


Spy In the House of Your Love

by Euphorion



Series: Polyamory [7]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, Bisexuality, Blowjobs, Cunnilingus, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Pre-Series, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-11-26
Packaged: 2018-04-19 12:39:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4746794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euphorion/pseuds/Euphorion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When Aida Riko was eight years old she successfully constructed a house of cards.</i>
</p><p>+</p><p>At long last, the final fic in the Polyamory series. Hyuuga, Kiyoshi, and Riko from her perspective. Begins pre-series, will stretch the entire way through until post-series.</p><p>Title - as all of the Polyamory fics - from Anais Mitchell, this time, like <i>Rise Like The Morning Stars</i>, from her song <i>Namesake</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! So! Here, finally, is. This. I thought it was only going to be one part, but that is definitely not true.
> 
> Note the warning for implied child abuse; I know it's a funny anime trope to have Riko's dad be gross and weird at her because ANIME but that is. Not a fun thing, and I've been trying to be relatively realistic with this series, so. There will absolutely _not_ be anything explicit!! But it will be treated as a real part of Riko's life.

When Aida Riko was eight years old she successfully constructed a house of cards.

Her father had given her the deck to keep her occupied as he studied, glancing over at her every so often and shaking his head in amusement as the cards slipped and slid and collapsed, defying her stub-fingered efforts. About half an hour later he received a telephone call, and when he looked back she had three stories built and was placing the final pair, her tongue trapped between her teeth.

He stared at her, mouth slightly agape, as she sat back from her work. Riko remembered the look on his face. It was the look she cherished most, sought after in all things: pure, unadulterated pride.

She also remembered the look on his face when she very deliberately reached out and tipped the whole thing over.

He watched her for another minute, and then got up and knelt next to her. “Why’d you do that?” he asked in a tone adults never used with her, like he was honestly interested in her answer.

She shrugged. “Crooked,” she said. “Was gonna fall.”

He laughed at her, running a hand through his hair in rueful amazement. “Precious girl,” he said, “you’re going to be your own worst enemy, one day.”

+

The first time Kiyoshi kissed her, she thought, _No. No, it’s too soon. No, it’s too soon, and too good._

No one met their soulmate in high school. Barely anyone even met their soulmate in college. Soulmates were adults, people who were people independently from one another but were better people together, not. Not her, half-formed, still working out how to dress, how to live, how to move in the world.

She was supposed to have a few trial runs, practice games, training camps—boys who were too rough with her, or not rough enough, boys who didn’t understand the way she worked, boys who took her for granted, boys who wasted her time. Boys who didn’t kiss her like this, certain and uncertain at once, perfect and wide-mouthed and warm.

No, she wanted to tell him when he pulled back, his hands still curled gentle and questioning at her throat. No.

“Riko?” he asked softly. “What’s wrong?”

 _You’re too early,_ she thought, but leaned in to kiss him back anyway, and his mouth curled into a smile against hers. _You’re too early, and now it’s going to have to end._

+

She was right, of course, but even she had to admit that the way it ended surprised her.

She looked at Kiyoshi over the rims of her glasses. They were hanging out at his place—there was no way her father would allow Kiyoshi anywhere near her own bedroom as a friend, doubly so if he’d known they were dating—and she was sitting at his desk, but turned to face him, her notebook at her elbow, trying to draw up some kind of strategy for their second real week of practice. 

“He’s really got you worked up,” she said, watching Kiyoshi pace.

He made a face at her—eyes squinted, his mouth rueful and wry. “Is it so obvious?”

She pressed her lips together, amused. “You haven’t stopped talking about him for the last hour and a half.”

“Ahhh,” said Kiyoshi, and rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry, he just—“

He made a wordless gesture that Riko was beginning to associate very strongly with their new team member. They were all new team members, really, considering they’d just started the club itself, but. There was something a different kind of new about Hyuuga Junpei.

“It’s okay,” she reassured him, reaching out to him with her legs. He stepped obediently between them and she used her toes to nudge him close, looking up at him but also past him, thinking of Hyuuga. “I’m intrigued, too.”

Kiyoshi looked down at her, eyebrows raised. “Oh?”

She nodded. “I’ve never seen you play that well with anyone, for one thing.”

He looked confused, opened his mouth to protest, but she fixed him with a look. “The Kings were different,” she said firmly. “I know it and so do you. You had strategy worked out, you knew each other, but strategy and knowledge aren’t the only elements to good basketball.” She softened her voice. “If they were, you would have gone to Rakuzan with the rest of them.”

Kiyoshi’s eyes slid past her face. “Except Hanamiya.”

She gave him a little nod. They didn’t really talk about Hanamiya, and she was content to keep it that way—there was some pain that healed best left alone; bruises and broken bones, rather than wounds to be sewn shut by needle-point words. “Except Hanamiya.”

He rolled his neck, looking contemplative. “You might be right.”

She grinned at him. “You know better.”

He laughed and bent to kiss her. “You _are_ right,” he corrected himself. “In this, as in all things.”

She hummed into his kiss, and when she pulled back again—a little breathless, because he was really really good at that—she said, “So I think you should start playing with him one-on-one.”

KIyoshi blinked at her. “I don’t think he’d want to, he basically hates me.”

Riko—doubted that, had seen enough of Hyuuga’s glares to comfortably categorize them as overcompensation, she just wasn’t sure yet what he was compensating for. “Rivalry is a powerful motivator,” she pointed out, instead of giving voice to anything else, yet. “Besides, no one could hate you for long.”

He went red and dropped his head against her shoulder, mumbling something soft and incoherent, and she buried her hands in his hair and nearly forgot to wait for the other shoe to drop.

+

It was the wrong metaphor, really. Cliches rarely hold perfectly true, and if this was a shoe dropping it was dropping in very low gravity, because she watched it all the way down.

She watched Kiyoshi come off the court after his sunset games with Hyuuga sweating and exhausted and radiating a kind of contentment she’d never seen on him. She watched the way his eyes followed Hyuuga as he went through his drills, watched the way his gaze settled on him in class, watched the way he reacted to Hyuuga’s snapped insults and weightless barbs like a ship gathering speed from tempestuous winds—taking a calm, quiet kind of strength from them, a calm, quiet kind of resolve. Taking them as they were meant, not as they were said. She watched them play each other, and then watched them play together. Watched Hyuuga’s bright-eyed admiration and smug satisfaction and the genuine respect in the hand he held out to Kiyoshi the first time they won a game, watched Kiyoshi’s cheeks heat when he clasped it, with weariness and his own satisfaction and—something else. 

She knew that blush, knew how it felt against her fingertips, against her lips.

So when Kiyoshi stepped up to her one day after practice, uncertain in his own skin in a way that he hadn’t been with her in months, when he said, “Riko, I—I think I—“, well. It was barely an impact at all.

“I know,” she said, and smiled the smile she’d been practicing for days. Slid a hand up his jaw, tried to figure out how to move her fingers right. “I—I know.”

He stared at her. “What do I do? I love you so much.”

 _That_ hit her hard. That she hadn’t planned for. He’d never said it before—neither of them had, and it wasn’t like she doubted it was true but to hear it now, in this context, like the breath before the _but_ , it. She swallowed, and then had to swallow again, and his face crumpled. He went to his knees in front of her, arms wrapped tight around her waist, pressed his face against her stomach.

Riko tilted her head back to stare at the sky, her hands settling on top of his head. “I love you, too,” she said, so softly she didn’t know if he even heard.

+

She expected—somewhere in the back of her head—to start resenting Hyuuga. He was, after all, very slowly stealing her boyfriend out from under her nose. But she couldn’t; she got mad at him, mostly because he seemed absolutely determined to get under her skin; she even got bitter, at times. But _resentment_ required that he was somehow getting something he didn’t deserve, and she couldn’t quite convince herself that was true.

Part of it was that he tried so hard; there were few things in the world Riko respected more than pure, simple effort, and Hyuuga worked harder than anyone she’d ever seen. At basketball—but at life, too, at school and at being someone his team could admire. He had a lot of almost old-fashioned ideals of honor and competition and self-sacrifice, cobbled together from the pages of every kind of literature on historical heroes and warriors that he could lay his hands on, but instead of making him stiff and traditional it just made him—better. A better man, a better human, sarcastic and caustic and defensive and good.

Part of it was how happy he made Kiyoshi. Not always—most of the time he made him some mix of bewildered, self-conscious, and extraordinarily competitive—but sometimes she saw in him an easy, striving sort of joy, the joy of working hard at something you loved and having someone meet you there, egg you on, demand more from you.

It woke an answering happiness in her, a kind of displaced happiness, fierce and proud and wholly unselfish, the same kind of happiness that seeing her team play well made her feel, only a little more intimate, closer to her heart. Like she was a conductor, watching her soloists wind in and out of one another’s melodies, creating something together that she could only imagine in the abstract but was still somehow–her song, played through their instruments.

And a part of it was that Hyuuga was—increasingly and in a very real way—her best friend.

She wasn’t really sure how it happened, and she wasn’t even sure he would classify her that way—Izuki had her beat in terms of length of friendship, after all, and friendships between dudes were something she had no interest in competing with. But he fell in at her side very naturally, and it always gave her a little thrill of satisfaction, the certainty that he had her back. Kiyoshi did too, of course, but where Kiyoshi’s support was a constant silent rock she could lean against when she needed it, Hyuuga’s support was an arrow in her quiver when she thought she had none. He filled her silences, silenced her fears. He was in all ways the captain to her coach, and she found—suddenly and with no shift in emotion—that she loved him for it.

That was fine; she’d loved a lot of people for a lot of things. It wasn’t an active or a demanding love, it didn’t itch her under her skin like her initial crush on Teppei. It just sometimes nudged her when she wasn’t looking, pushed a sadness into her mouth that shouldn’t be there. And the jealousy she felt when she watched him and Kiyoshi on the court—stuck up under her ribs at first as jealousy that Hyuuga was fulfilling something she couldn’t for her boyfriend—carved its aching path to her heart itself, transformed now into jealousy that they were fulfilling something she couldn’t for each other.

“I have something to say,” she said to Kiyoshi, sitting on a bench in the park under distant stars, “but—I feel stupid about it, like. Like I’m hopping on some sort of bandwagon.”

Kiyoshi reached out, pulled her against his side. “You’ve never been on a bandwagon in your life,” he said steadily, but there was a fierce note of curiosity to his voice. “I don’t think you’ll start now.”

Riko licked her lips. “I—get it. How you feel about Hyuuga.”

He shifted, a little. “Oh,” he said, but she could tell he didn’t understand. “That’s good, right—“

“No,” she said quickly, turned to look at him. “I mean I get it, I—I feel it.”

“Oh,” he said again, entirely differently, and she saw a lot of things in his eyes—understanding, a stab of envy, and finally pure, almost despairing amusement. He grinned wide at her. “Aren’t we a pair,” he said softly. “I should’ve known you’d wise up someday.”

She made a face at him, but it slipped into a smile. Tension that she hadn’t even been aware of drained out of her, and she started laughing too fast, her chest fluttering with relief and nervousness. He tilted their foreheads together, ran blunt fingertips across the skin under her ear. “So,” he said, his breath across her lips, “what do we do?”

She kissed him, once, because it always helped her think. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I’ll run some recon. We can go from there.”

+

She let her feet carry her to the edge of the court next to Izuki, her clipboard at her chest. “Izuki-kun,” she said, “can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot,” said Izuki, and then he grinned at her. “Wait, sorry, that’s my job.” He waited, and then made a little shooting-a-basketball movement with his hands, in case she didn’t get it.

She rolled her eyes, using the familiar fond exasperation to build up her armor a little, and then she said, quickly and quietly, “Hyuuga, does he—like boys? At all?”

Izuki stared at her, his satisfaction with his pun fading into total surprise. “That’s a pretty personal question,” he said, and for once she could tell nothing at all from his face or his voice. “Why?”

“I want to order him strippers for his birthday, and I know I would have more fun if there was a little variety,” she said dryly, watching his eyes. Hyuuga’s birthday wasn’t for another six months—to name one of a dozen problems with that statement—but she hoped the joke would set him at ease, remind him who he was talking to. She tried to beam her good intentions directly into his brain.

Izuki shifted on his feet a little. “I don’t really think that’s a question you should be asking me,” he said. “You want to know, you should ask him.”

Riko bit her lip and turned back to watch the players on the court, her shoulders dropping. It had been worth a shot, at least.

“If you were to ask me, I definitely wouldn’t be able to give you a straight answer,” Izuki said, after a minute.

It took her a second to process, and then she laughed, startled, and he looked slyly sideways at her. “God,” she breathed. “That one was actually pretty good.”

“They’re all good!” Izuki protested, and Riko blew her whistle to signal practice’s end.

+

“So,” she said to Teppei, later, her legs across his on his couch. “You know I love a good competition, but it’s important that this not turn into that. We make no moves. We make no grand romantic gestures. We say nothing. It has to be a free choice, freely made. Okay?”

Teppei nodded, his eyes distant. It seemed like it took effort for him to look at her again, and when he did there was a heartbreak in his eyes that stopped her cold. “Do we actually have to break up?” he asked, his voice rough.

She clambered forward to straddle his hips instead, perching on his lap, and his huge hands settled at her waist. She tucked her thumbs under his jaw to tilt his head upward. “Don’t think about it as breaking up,” she said, her own voice a little thick. “It’s just—a pause, like. We don’t know if he’ll choose either of us, maybe in six months we’ll both be heartbroken and finding solace in each others’ arms.” She smiled, crooked. “Maybe this is just half-time.”

He shook his head. “Nowhere near,” he said, and drew lines up her spine. “End of the first quarter at most, and even that sounds scary.” His hands were everywhere, skimming across her biceps, her waist, up under her shirt, and she bit her lip, hard. “Riko,” he breathed, his eyes dropping to her mouth and then returning to her eyes, his expression blisteringly sincere, “you have to know, this is the only reason that I would ever—“

 _No it isn’t_ , Riko thought, but his fingers were skimming up her ribs and she leaned forward to lick into his mouth instead, her hands going back to undo the hooks on her bra, shaking the loose straps down her arms a little so he could push his hands up beneath it. He groaned, brushing his knuckles over her nipples and his nose against her throat, and Riko laughed a shaky, crazy laugh against his ear. “Enjoy,” she said, “this is one thing I’ve got that Hyuuga doesn’t.”

Teppei grinned and kissed her collarbone. “I’ll miss them,” he said, and then, more seriously, “I’ll miss you.”

Riko tangled her fingers tight in his hair. “You’ll still have me,” she said, because that much was true. “Always.”

+

They didn’t really act differently around each other at school, but Riko could tell Hyuuga at least knew something was off. They arrived separately, for one thing, and Kiyoshi didn’t lean in to brush a kiss across her cheek before homeroom like he had every day for months. They didn’t linger for each other after all their classes, at least not as much, and Hyuuga—started to hover, looked like some kind of confused blond sheepdog, his gaze flickering between them like he expected one or both of them to burst into tears.

“Stop that,” she said, smacking him lightly in the arm as he checked up on her for the fourth time, a few days after they put their plan into action. “We’re okay.”

“I wasn’t doing anything,” he muttered, rubbing his arm like she’d punched him much harder than she had.

She just gave him a look, unimpressed, and he looked away. “Okay—together?” he asked, voice abrupt.

She took a breath, watching his profile. “Right now,” she said carefully, “okay apart.”

He turned back toward her, staring. For a long moment she thought he would ask her why, and she tried to calmly choose one of the five or six answers running through her head— _we just need some space, we feel like we’ve run our course, I want to focus more on school, Teppei’s in love with you and so am I_ —tried to school her expression into something not-panicked; but he just furrowed his brow and said, “I’m sorry.”

She almost laughed. “Don’t be,” she said, and ignored the fact that she has to refer to it, even in the silence of her own head, as _putting their plan into action_ and not _breaking up_.

+

 

The day Hyuuga cut and dyed his hair back to black was was one of the most disorienting of Riko’s life.

It—did things to his face, or undid the things that his long, blond hair had done to it; suddenly his jaw was sharp and his cheekbones were high and his eyes—which she’d labeled previously as a kind of muddled brown or grey—were revealed as _green_ , not bright green but a gorgeous kind of grey-green like seaglass, like the sea itself. She ran into him on the way to school and barely recognized him—didn’t, from behind; didn’t until he called out to her as she passed and then raised a hand in slightly annoyed confusion when she looked back at him.

She blinked, stared. “Hyuuga…kun?”

He tugged at a bit of his hair, grimacing. “God, does it really look that weird?”

She shook her head and waited for him, glad for the opportunity to just stare. “Just unexpected,” she said. “When did you get it done?”

“Did most of it myself last night,” he admitted. “Except the back, which my dad did—he’s a barber.”

“Really? It looks really good. You should do mine, sometime.” She didn’t think too hard about that, about how it would feel, having his attention on her in such a targeted way for so long.

Hyuuga blinked at her. “Yeah,” he said, “okay.”

_SOS,_ she texted Teppei, and a blurry but still representative pic she’d snapped while pretending to take a selfie. _SOS!!!!_

_oh god_ , he texted back. _thanks for the warning_

Even with it, though, she saw it hit him when they walked into class. His eyes widened, flickered to her in pain for a second, and then slid inexorably back to Hyuuga. 

Who—noticing nothing—scowled at him, the expression a familiar one even if it had leveled up several times in attractiveness. “What?”

Kiyoshi closed his mouth. “Your hair looks good,” he said, with remarkable self-restraint.

Riko had some pretty good restraint herself, or she would have burst out laughing.

+

She approached the basketball court slowly. They’d never been so formal as to–draw lines, or anything, but they still each had, like, zones of non-interference. She didn’t linger to watch their sunset games anymore; Kiyoshi didn’t meet her on her walk to school, or her walk home. Little bubbles of privacy with Hyuuga in case—well. In case.

Play seemed to be paused. Kiyoshi had the basketball tucked under one arm, his other hand at his face, and Hyuuga was stepped up into his space, staring up at him. She blinked. There was something off—and then Kiyoshi lowered his hand and she realized what it was. Hyuuga wasn’t wearing his glasses; instead, they were perched on Kiyoshi’s nose, slipping down a little in his sweat.

She bit her lip, her heart aching. He used to steal hers, too, when she was paying too little attention to him and too much to her work, used to hold them way up above her head so she had to wrap her arms around his neck and hoist her legs up around his waist to be able to reach them, and by then, well. The distraction had been successful.

She swallowed against the lump in her throat. It was worth it, she told herself, looking at Kiyoshi’s warm, warm eyes behind Hyuuga’s frames. It was worth it, if it meant he looked like _that._

And—Hyuuga was looking back, and maybe it was because he was bare-faced but his eyes looked wide, his expression a little stunned. His hands were loose at his sides and—they’d never drawn _lines_ but she should still step off because what if this was—but—it was worth it, it was, but in this moment Riko still wasn’t quite ready to have to let go.

“Cute,” she called, and Kiyoshi looked at her, his smile shifting, and she was glad—glad she could tell the difference between his Hyuuga-smile and his Riko-smile, glad she didn’t have to watch him give hers to anyone else, and glad that he didn’t seem disappointed that she’d interrupted. She smiled back at him, crossing the court toward them.

Hyuuga—maybe counting on Kiyoshi being distracted by her, as if he could be with Hyuuga so close—made a grab at Kiyoshi’s face.

Kiyoshi dodged him easily, a tiny stutter to his movements, and Riko wondered if he was thinking about what she’d been thinking about, wondered if he was wondering what would happen if he lifted the glasses up and away, held them up high for Hyuuga to try for.

“Well,” Kiyoshi said, and judging by the little tinge of pink to his cheeks, he had been. “I’ll be going now.” He laid a hand on Riko’s shoulder as he passed, a little touch like the passing of a baton. “See you tomorrow, you two.”

Hyuuga stiffened. “Oi—“

“Teppei,” Riko said calmly.

Kiyoshi half-turned to her, his profile picked out in the fading light. “Hm?” he asked, as if he had no idea that Hyuuga’s glasses were still on his face.

Riko half expected him to dodge her, as well, when she reached up, but he didn’t, just held her eyes and let her slide Hyuuga’s glasses off his nose. Despite herself, she—lingered; he always looked so good like this, coming down from the game, all his muscles picked out sharp with the effort of setting himself against Hyuuga, his breath still a little quickened, his heart beating hard in his chest.

She wanted to tell him so. She wanted to kiss him. She did neither.

“Oh,” said Kiyoshi, and then let out a little self-deprecating chuckle. “I forgot!”

Hyuuga made a little strangled noise. “You—no, you did _not_ ,” he muttered, but Riko didn’t look at him—not yet. 

Kiyoshi turned away from her—releasing her—and left, waving a deceptively lazy hand over his head. “See you!”

Riko shook her head, watching him go. “What an idiot.” 

She looked down at the glasses in her hands, still not quite able to look at Hyuuga, not quite shifted from one kind of longing to another. Without really thinking about it, she cleaned Hyuuga’s glasses off on her skirt and then slid them onto her own face. She blinked. They made her vision a little weird and warped, but for the most part she could see perfectly fine.

“Oh?” she said. “You’re not very blind, Hyuuga-kun.” She turned to look at him. “Have you ever thought about contacts? Lots of athletes wear them.”

Hyuuga stared at her, and maybe it was just because his face was more open without the glasses because he still looked kind of stunned. It wasn’t a bad look on him. She resolved to try and take him by surprise more often.

“Lots of athletes have money,” he muttered.

She shook her head at him, couldn’t help but tease: “So would you, if you didn’t waste it all on stupid historical figurines. Honestly, that’s why I thought you’d be blind as a bat, you’re such an otaku—“

“I am not,” he snapped, glaring at her, and his eyes were sharp and bright and she—she never would have said there was anything missing from her relationship with Teppei but he didn’t react to her like this, didn’t rise to her bait, and having someone who did was thrilling in a completely different way than anything she’d felt before.

She grinned at him and relented, slipping the glasses from her face. “It’s a shame,” she said, holding them out to him. “You look good like this.”

As soon as she said it she felt guilty—she wasn’t supposed to compliment him, no matter how tempting it was, wasn’t supposed to do anything at all that might make him suspect. He took back his glasses and she stepped past him, swinging her school bag up and over her shoulder, playing it off as quickly as she could. “Shall we?”

Sunset was over; Teppei’s hour had ended, and this was hers and Hyuuga, theirs, their walk from the court to her door. The world was growing darker, a little cooler, slipping gold to blue like the lights on the stage of the world were fading, and Riko felt herself relax.

She loved routine, loved setting herself out on a path she understood, because it left her free to think, to plan even further ahead, like someone laying out the tracks in front of a toy train—there would, of course, always be things she didn’t expect, but this way she could see at least some of them coming, prevent herself from derailing as best she could.

She loved that she could set out toward her house and know that he would follow, settling quiet and content a few paces behind, there if she needed him the same way she was there if he needed her.

Sometimes she thought she didn’t even want to date him. Sometimes this kind of casual coexistence, this shared, breathing presence in the cooling night air, was all she could ever ask for from anyone.

“Hey,” Hyuuga said, and she slowed her pace a little so they were truly side by side, glancing over at him. He was watching her out of the corner of his eye, his face a little curious, a little concerned. “Why’d you tell Kiyoshi not to jump?”

Riko raised her eyebrows. “He told you?”

Hyuuga ran a hand through his hair. He was a kind of effortlessly attractive that set Riko’s teeth on edge, especially because it was still so _new_ ; being attracted to someone first and then getting to know them was one thing, that was fine because you got to admire from afar for a while, get used to the idea before you were confronted with it all the time. But suddenly finding someone you already care about, someone you already love, as attractive as she found Hyuuga was—maddening. 

“I was able to keep up with him today,” he said, his voice self-deprecating, and it was so—antithetical to all the compliments she wanted to give him that she almost laughed. “I shouldn’t have been.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself,” Riko chided. “There’s a reason you two make a good team.”

Hyuuga shrugged. “Still.”

Riko sighed and let it go, turning her mind to actually answering his question. She didn’t want him to worry, but—this was a weight she’d been bearing for weeks now, and whatever he felt for her Hyuuga had at least made it very clear that his metaphorical shoulders were just as strong and willing as his physical ones.

“He’s been favoring one of his legs,” she said. “He hasn’t said anything, but.” She bit her lip. “I know him, and if I asked he’d just deny it, so. Easier just to tell him to stop jumping until I know more about what’s wrong.”

She saw Hyuuga’s throat bob as he swallowed. “I didn’t notice,” he admitted, like it was a fault in himself.

Riko smiled sideways at him. “Of course you didn’t,” she said. “He’s been hiding it from you in particular.” She stretched upward, Hyuuga’s gaze a little warm on her skin. “Plus, noticing’s my job.”

“He’s okay, though, right?” Hyuuga asked.

She nodded. “It might be that we have to switch up his training regimen—maybe he’s just putting too much pressure on one side of his body. I don’t know yet. But for now, I told him to take it easy.” She bumped Hyuuga with a shoulder, knowing he must hate playing with Kiyoshi at anything but full capacity. “Sorry.”

Hyuuga shook his head with a scowl, like she’d said something stupid. “We can stop playing one-on-one—“

“No,” said Riko immediately. Not just because Kiyoshi would _hate_ it, and it would cut into his zone of personal time with Hyuuga, but because tactically, it didn’t make any sense.

Hyuuga raised his eyebrows at her, and she looked steadily back. She wasn’t supposed to say anything about herself, but if the look Hyuuga had given Kiyoshi on the court was anything to go by, she might get somewhere dropping little hints for the opposition. “You haven’t noticed?” she asked. “I guess you wouldn’t.”

“Notice what?” Hyuuga asked, annoyed.

“You never saw him play in middle school,” she said. “He was good—obviously, he was amazing. But now he’s better.”

Hyuuga blinked. “But surely that’s you.”

Riko grinned at him, warmed by the compliment, by the unhesitating, unquestioning way that it was delivered. “I’m not saying I won’t take any credit,” she admitted. “But he’s not just coached better, he plays better. Because he plays with you.” She felt her smile soften, knew that she was smiling her Teppei-smile, wondered if Hyuuga did, too, if he knew her smiles the way she knew Kiyoshi’s. 

Of course not. Why would he? 

“Our Iron Heart’s not so Iron after all,” she continued. “When he’s playing with good players, he’s great. But when he’s playing with people he likes?” She shook her head, watching his face. “He’s unbelievable.”

Hyuuga licked his lips. It was hard to tell in the dusk, but she thought—with a little jolt that was half victory and half despair—that he was blushing. “He’d still be playing with people he liked,” he protested, “Izuki and everyone…”

She wanted to—shake him by the shoulders. She’d said he wasn’t blind but he really, definitely was, if he thought the way Kiyoshi looked at him was _anything_ like the way he looked at Izuki or the others. She resisted the urge to kick him in the ankles and shout _he loves you he loves you he loves you_ , barely, restrained herself to a short, “You’re very stupid, you know.”

He bristled. Before he could protest—before she could do anything stupider, anything else outside of her rail-road plan—she reached up and carded her fingers through his hair, just once, nervous and self-indulgent. “Goodnight,” she said, and fled into her house.

She closed her door behind her and leaned against it, letting her strength drain out through her feet. 

_Are you okay?_ she texted Kiyoshi, because her own heart wouldn’t settle down. _Looked pretty tense out there today._

She’d just pulled off her shoes and flopped down on her bed when he texted her back, _I wanted to kiss him so badly._

Riko bit her lip, thought about the glimpse of Hyuuga’s face she’d caught in the wake of her ruffling his hair. Thought of his maybe-blush in the dusk. _Yeah_ , she texted back.

A few minutes later: _wanted to kiss you, too._

She squeezed her eyes closed. 

_Yeah._

+

Sometimes the things that derailed her were total surprises. Things entirely outside of her control; acts of weather or of God, the actions of people she didn’t know. That was frustrating, but made it easer to adjust, after. Made it easier to clear the area and start again.

But sometimes—sometimes the things that pulled her up short were things she should have seen, or things she did see, with a part of her that she refused to listen to or interpret into action.

She’d seen, months ago, the way Teppei was favoring his knee. She’d seen him ignore it, push on anyway, had trusted him—stupid, stupid—to know his own limits. Trusted him—stupid, stupid!—not to injure himself. Because normally he would. Normally, he was smart enough with his body not to put it at risk.

Normally, he wasn’t playing against Hanamiya.

She had nothing in the world to blame but herself.

Hyuuga walked her home from the hospital, for which she was—eternally, impossibly grateful, felt like she was operating on no reserves at all, like maybe she was hooked directly into the beat of his heart like life support because her own had stopped dead when Kiyoshi fell.

“This is my fault,” she said blankly, almost more to the silent world than to Hyuuga himself. Her throat ached with guilt and horror, her hands loose, useless at her sides. “I saw him favoring his leg—I should have known, I should have seen it, I should have benched him—“

Hyuuga stopped, grabbing her shoulder to spin her to him. “Hey,” he said, the urgency in his voice forcing her eyes to his. “Hey.”

She blinked at him, and he glared at her. It was—steadying, calming, and his voice was impossibly sure. “This is not your fault.”

She—appreciated it, but she couldn’t believe him. “It’s my job to notice,” she said bitterly, “remember?”

“Mine, too,” he snapped immediately, “both of us, as his coach and his captain, as people who love him.” He swallowed, just a little flicker of throat, like he’d said something he didn’t mean to, and then continued, just as strident, “so unless you’re gonna blame me, too, shut the fuck up.”

People who love him. She stared up at him, at the anxious certainty in his eyes. _People who love him._ She wanted to cry—not even with sorrow so much as with relief. Somehow, that resettled the earth under her feet the way nothing else could. Of course that’s what they were—united in that, a team, a category of their very own. People who love him the way that they love him. The loves of Kiyoshi Teppei.

“That goes for you, too,” she said, when she could trust her voice again. “So no going home and crying your eyes out, either.”

He blinked at her, slow and sad. “No promises,” he said softly.

She swallowed. “God,” she said. “What if he doesn’t get better—“

“It would’ve killed him to be benched,” he interrupted her. “You know that.” He shook his head, a tiny, horrible smile playing around his mouth. “He still might have done it, because I’ve never seen him refuse you, but it would’ve killed him.”

She dropped her eyes, but he was right.

Hyuuga ducked down a little, lifted her chin with two warm fingers. “He’s going to be fine,” he said, holding her eyes, his own _achingly_ beautiful, filled with pain and worry and reassurance, “and we’re going to win.”

She stared at him, heart pained, because kissing him would be—everything she wanted, and the worst thing she could do. Kissing him would confuse the easy category he’d just put himself in, would obstruct the truth that would make Kiyoshi so, so happy in the wake of this catastrophic blow. Kissing him would show him exactly how much he always helped, exactly how much he always _mattered_ , and would be absolute betrayal of the first boy she ever loved, lying broken and unknowing in a hospital bed.

She felt her lips tremble, but she forced herself to nod and reach up, wrapping her arms tight around him instead of bringing their mouths together, and his arms settled around her, his heart beating fast in his chest. He was warm, warm and solid against her, and she lifted her face to speak in his ear. “You better hope you’re right, because I really don’t think you want to strip naked and confess to the person you like.”

Quickly—a little goodbye, a consolation prize for herself—she pressed a kiss to his cheek, and then she let him go.

It wasn’t until she was all the way inside—breezing through her living room all the way to her bedroom and closing the door behind her—that she let herself cry. 

She thought she’d kept it silent, shoving her face into her pillow, but her father heard anyway, tapped on her door before he entered, settled on the end of her bed. “Riko,” he said quietly, and she could tell he was drunk by the little looping, grasping motions his fingers made against her sheets. “What’s wrong?”

She sat up, shifted her shoulders back into something strong. “My friend was hurt,” she said, “in today’s game, and. We lost.” She scrubbed a hand across her eyes. “ _I_ lost.” She was talking about basketball, and she wasn’t.

Her father reached out to wipe her tears away, his fingers lingering on her cheeks. “Loss is the worst thing you can feel,” he said, and he was talking about basketball and he wasn’t. “Sometimes I think it could drive a man mad.”

She took his hand from her face, squeezing it briefly, and then giving it back to him. “I’d like to sleep, if that’s okay.”

“Sure,” he said, but he stayed, watching her while she put away school bag, tidied her desk, did a thousand small things to keep her mind off the moment Kiyoshi’s face twisted with horrible pain, the moment she knew what she’d done. Finally she cleared her throat, giving him a pointed look, and her father levered himself to his feet, leaning against her doorway a minute like he wanted to say something else.

“Goodnight,” she said firmly.

He sighed. “Goodnight, Riko.”

A few minutes after he left she got up to close the door behind him, leaning her little set of children’s bells against it like a tripwire.

+

When she visited Kiyoshi in the hospital the next afternoon she honestly expected Hyuuga to have already been there, to have already—confessed, but she had heard nothing and surely he would have at least texted her something, or called, or. Anything, surely they weren’t still—

She wrenched the door to Kiyoshi’s room open maybe a little too hard.

He was alone, and sleeping—his brows knit, a little, his wrists slack and turned upward, his hands open. He looked troubled and vulnerable at once in a way that pulled Riko apart, all of her jealousies and preoccupations fading into nothing. She approached him slow, quiet, careful to have her shoes make no noise on the floor.

He was breathing shallow—was he in pain? she should speak to his nurse—and his eyes were flickering behind his eyelids, so she had no qualms at all about leaning down over him and kissing him, slow and soft.

He blinked his eyes open as she pulled away, and then blinked them wider. “Riko—“

She smiled at him, her chest tight. “Hey.”

He raised a hand, cupping her cheek, his eyes confused. “Is this—are you giving up—“

She laughed, pressing her mouth to his palm, because she didn’t have to, she was defeated anyway. “No,” she said, petting his hair away from his face. “No. But—I—“ she swallowed hard. “Can we—just today.” _Before I have to give you up forever._

Kiyoshi nodded, his eyes slipping to her lips, and she leaned in again, and, so much more than sitting alone but not alone enough in her bedroom, it felt like coming home.

+

Hyuuga didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything for days. He didn’t say anything for _weeks_ , and Riko sometimes stole a kiss or two from Kiyoshi because any single one of them could be their last but Hyuuga still didn’t say anything and she couldn’t tell why.

Without Kiyoshi’s daily zones of influence—shifted to the days he texted her letting her know that Hyuuga was coming over and how much time she should give them—she and Hyuuga drew closer together, like they were somehow trying to bridge the gap of his absence. They welcomed new first years to the team, incredible, impossible new first years, and for a while her personal longings got subsumed by her work.

Only—sort of, though, because they still visited Kiyoshi at the hospital together and she still saw the way they looked at each other and. And Hyuuga was a part of her work, made himself slowly indispensable to her, and they carved out a new space of their own, a working-space, a strategic space, talked tactics on the way to school in the morning. His hands on hers as she laid out her tracks.

It was dangerous, she knew, but even her self-control wasn’t perfect.

It was both easier and much harder when Kiyoshi came back. Easier to pull away, because she could remind herself why she was doing it, but harder, because seeing them back on the court awoke that distant, conductor happiness in her again even as it made her so, so certain it was only a matter of time.

Once again—always, always—she was right.

She came back from dropping a load of laundry off in the locker rooms to find the first years still playing each other as she’d left them, but Hyuuga was nowhere to be seen, and Kiyoshi was frozen on the sidelines, one hand to his mouth.

She started approaching him, but Izuki slipped up beside her. “Don’t leap to any conclusions,” he warned.

She glanced at him, puzzled. “That’s a bit serious, for you.”

Izuki shrugged, his shoulders loose. “Hyuuga matters,” he said shortly. “But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?”

Riko swallowed. “No,” she said. “No.”

Izuki smiled at her. “Good.”

She started toward Kiyoshi again, and he said, “Riko-san.”

She turned, raising her eyebrows, and he watched her with his sharp, knowing eyes. “You matter, too,” he said. “Don’t try to convince yourself otherwise.”

She blinked at him, startled. “I—I won’t,” she said, and then, “thank you.”

Izuki inclined his head. “Just playing my part.”

“With grace,” she said, and smiled at him. “As always.”

She turned to Kiyoshi, who looked down at her, unseeing. “Teppei.”

He swallowed. “Hyuuga kissed me,” he said, blankly, like a child repeating news he’d heard but didn’t understand.

Riko took a long breath, and saw him stutter, swallow, stutter again, and then his breathing matched hers, like she was maybe teaching him how. “Took him long enough,” she managed finally, a little laughing, little miserable, and he reached for her, tangled his fingers in her shirt and tugged.

She stepped forward and he laid his cheek against her forehead, his arms loose around her shoulders. The first-years had stopped playing, now; Kagami was toweling himself off, watching them curiously, but he didn’t seem inclined to approach. His boyfriend was nowhere to be seen. 

“He said your name,” Kiyoshi said, still in that same dreamy tone, and Riko’s heartbeat picked up. “He kissed me, and then he said your name, what—what does that mean?”

Riko licked her lips, refusing to let herself hope. “It’s probably just his stupid chivalry complex,” she said, because. It was, Hyuuga was such an idiot about it that he thought him dating Kiyoshi would hurt her. Which. It _would_ , but that was okay, and it wasn’t for the reasons he thought anyway, and—

“Can we go somewhere? Else?” Kiyoshi said, a little pleading. “I don’t know what I’ll do if he comes back.”

Riko nodded, displacing his head a little, and took his hand, leading him away. Izuki watched them go.

Kiyoshi kept their hands linked between them as they walked to his apartment, staring at the ground, and Riko felt—transported back in time, to previous routine, felt like she was retracing the steps of the Kiyoshi and herself that they’d been before Hyuuga arrived on the scene. Felt herself—here at the end of things—walking like a shadow at the heels of a Riko convinced that things would end.

“W, um. Was it a good kiss?” she asked, her voice getting a little lost on the way out of her mouth.

Kiyoshi’s mouth curled, and he shook his head.

Riko was surprised into laughter. “No?!”

Kiyoshi licked his lips, glancing at her sideways, pained and amused and desperate. “I think he tried to think better of it halfway through but had already committed,” he said. “He kind of missed. I—I wanted to grab him and kiss him back but I was too surprised—“

Riko clicked her tongue. “There was a time when you made every shot he ever missed,” she reminded him. “I’m disappointed in you.”

The look he gave her was so full of disbelief and love that she had to look away, her heart squeezing hard in her chest. His hand tightened on hers. “Sorry, coach.”

She bit her lip, hard, tasted iron. “Y-you’ll have to p-practice—“ Her throat closed on her.

He stopped, pulling her into his arms. “Riko,” he said into her hair as she cried. “Riko.”

She gripped the back of his jersey, hard. “Sorry,” she said, and it came out a sob. “I’m sorry—“

“Shut up,” he said, and she laughed, hiccuping against his chest.

She didn’t cry for long—she never did, experienced grief like a series of small squalls rather than a big storm, and she wasn’t even sure it was grief she was experiencing now, because along with all the desperate emotion she was _light_ , unburdened, relaxed. She’d much rather have an answer that didn’t suit her than be living under a constant question.

“It’s not decided,” Kiyoshi said quietly, as if intentionally shaking her foundations, when they’d made it to his apartment. They were both slow to turn on the light, thinking, maybe, that the waiting state they were in was better suited to the afternoon light—the light they shared, neither Kiyoshi’s sunset or Riko’s dawn.

She shrugged. “I think it is,” she said. “I think you won.”

Kiyoshi looked at her sideways. “I thought you said it was important we not make it a competition.”

“We didn’t,” she said steadily. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a prize.”

Kiyoshi looked like he wanted to argue, but they were interrupted by the buzz of the doorbell. Riko looked at Kiyoshi—suddenly ramrod-straight with nervousness—and crossed to the panel herself, pressing the button. “Who is it?”

“Ah, it’s Hyuuga,” said Hyuuga, sounding nervous even over the crackling intercom.

Riko swallowed. “Junpei,” she said, to make it clear how serious this was, and. Because. Because she wanted to. “I’m here too, just so you know.”

“Good,” said Hyuuga, steadier. “I would like to talk to you both, please.”

Riko glanced at Kiyoshi. “I told you,” he said quietly, and she rolled her eyes and pressed the button to let Hyuuga in.

He jogged up the stairs and past her through the door, coming to a halt inside. It suddenly struck her that he probably hadn’t been here much before, and that–felt appropriate somehow, if a little sorrowful, felt right that she be the one to open Kiyoshi’s door to him.

Hyuuga was staring at Kiyoshi, and Kisyohi wouldn’t meet his eyes.

Riko closed the door and come to stand by the end of the couch, watching. Always, always watching.

“I’m sorry,” Hyuuga said.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Kiyoshi flinch. She closed her eyes.

“No,” Hyuuga said quickly “I didn’t mean—I’m not sorry for kissing you,” he said firmly, and Riko opened her eyes again. “I have wanted to for a long time and I—I’m glad I did, whatever comes of it.” His eyes flickered to Riko’s and away, like the touch of a match to her hopes, quick and bright. “But it’s more complicated than that and I think you know that.”

Kiyoshi had dropped his head, his cheeks coloring, and Hyuuga stared at him for a moment before facing Riko squarely. “Will you tell me why you broke up?” he asked. “I—asked Kiyoshi, before, but he just said it was mutual and that he didn’t want to tell me without you.”

Riko raised her eyebrows at Kiyoshi, surprised. When had that happened? “You didn’t tell me he asked.”

Kiyoshi looked guilty. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was when I was in the hospital, and you guys were spending so much time together and I thought—“ he stared hard at his knees. “I thought he would just go to you once he knew.”

Riko shook her head. “Stupid,” she accused.

“Hey,” said Hyuuga, annoyed. “C’mon, stop speaking in code, you assholes.”

Riko grinned at him. “Okay,” she said, and then bit her lip, throwing caution to the winds. “Technically, we broke up because of you.”

“Riko!” Kiyoshi said in horror. “That’s so mean, that sounds so awful!”

Hyuuga was staring at her, his face blank. “E-excuse me?”

Riko sighed, gathered herself, adopted her best Coach Aida voice because it was the only way she would get through this without trembling. “We’re in love with you,” she said, bald and straightforward, “both of us. Teppei realized first and he was all horribly guilty about it, but then I started thinking about it too and like.” She let herself look at him, really look, like she never did unless she knew he wasn’t watching. When her eyes got back to his face he licked his lips, and she flushed. 

“Yeah,” she continued, almost a cough of embarrassment rather than a word, and she was talking too fast, she knew she was talking too fast but she couldn’t quite figure out how to stop. “So. We really weren’t sure about how you felt about either of us—I mean, Teppei still probably thinks you hate him because he’s a total idiot but I don’t know, like, we fight all the time, and we hang out a lot but maybe it’s just because it’s good for the club to have a united coach and captain or you like me but just as a friend and—“

Hyuuga stepped into her space, curling a long-fingered hand around the back of her neck and leaning down to press his mouth to hers, and it was such a graceful, decisive movement that Riko kept talking against his mouth for a second before it hit her, and then. She, he, he was kissing her, insistent, and she couldn’t breathe right, wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back. His lips were soft and clever and there was a tiny scrape of his stubble over her jaw and she shivered, gave up, licked into his mouth.

She probably could have kissed him forever but she made herself pull away, leaning back from him but not too far. “Mm,” she said, breathless. “Okay. That answers that, then.”

Hyuuga was staring at her, his slips parted and his eyes huge, and she smirked.

“Unfair,” Kiyoshi complained, teasing and sad, “that was a much better kiss than I got.”

Hyuuga stepped back from Riko slowly. “Why didn’t you say anything?” he demanded. He finally looked away from her, his gaze finding Kiyoshi like a drowning man looking for the shore. “Either of you? I—fuck, it would have made my life so much easier.” 

He stepped sideways until he was standing between Kiyoshi’s knees, and Riko’s breath caught in her throat at the way his face softened, the way he slowly raised his hands. He ran his fingertips lightly up Kiyoshi’s throat and across his face, impossibly gentle. Kiyoshi took a breath, and with the same confident purity of motion he’d used to kiss her Hyuuga leaned down and captured his mouth.

Riko had a wild, swinging kind of thought that Kiyoshi had taken her disappointment to heart and vowed to shape up, because he kissed Hyuuga the way that she had only felt, never seen. His hand came up to play with Hyuuga’s hair like he was appreciating the cut of it all over again, and when Hyuuga relaxed a little Kiyoshi’s jaw shifted and she—god, she knew that kiss so well, and the way Hyuuga’s whole body went a little limp pulled the strength from her muscles. Kiyoshi had a hand on Hyuuga’s hip like he knew he might need a bit of stability, and Riko clutched at the end of the couch to try to get her own.

Hyuuga pulled back to breathe, tipping their foreheads together.

Mouth barely inches from his, Kiyoshi said, “we broke up so you could choose.” He sounded breathless and Riko simultaneously wanted to pull them apart and never wanted to look at anything but the way they fit together ever again.

“Choose,” Hyuuga said weakly, “I—I don’t have to, do I—I don’t think I could—“

Riko found her strength and strode over to them, smacking them both on the back of the head because it was that or kiss them and she couldn’t—navigate that, had no idea who to kiss first or, and, the idea of kissing _either_ of them with their mouths warm from the other, she. This was going to be really hard to deal with.

“Don’t say shit like that, Teppei,” she said, “not when you call me mean.” She smiled at Hyuuga, reassuring. “Of course you don’t have to,” she said. “But we thought you did—we thought you were going to, because.” Because nothing worked like this, no one found this, not now, not ever. She shrugged, letting the larger-scale thoughts slide off her shoulders and down her back. “Society, I guess?”

Hyuuga’s mouth dropped open. “Society.”

Riko lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “It’s not like you had anyone around showing you you could be in love with two people. Hell, we didn’t know if you were even interested in either of us.”

Hyuuga shook his head. “You’re kidding.” He said, dubious. “You have to be kidding.”

“Hyuuga-kun,” Kiyoshi said quietly, “last time we talked about your feelings towards me you told me you hated me.” 

Riko rolled her eyes at him, and he noticed, reached out to her with his free hand, and. It pulled her heart up into her throat, made her swallow hard, to have him invite her into the close warm tangle of him and Hyuuga. She took his hand, trying to beam all her gratitude into his eyes.

“I didn’t mean it,” Hyuuga protested.“I never meant it, obviously I never—“ He caught Riko’s eyes and glared at her. “You knew,” he accused. “I basically told you I was in love with him, the day he collapsed!”

Kiyoshi made a high, choking sort of noise and pulled Hyuuga closer, tipping his head against his side. Hyuuga draped an arm around his head, still glaring, like he was protecting Kiyoshi from Riko’s lies of omission.

Riko bit her lip. “You did,” she admitted, and Kiyoshi made a smaller version of the same noise. “Honestly,” she said, “I thought you’d tell him immediately after that. I thought—I don’t know, I thought it was over, you’d chosen, but then you didn’t say anything and I thought I was wrong and I didn’t feel right telling him myself, not when you hadn’t said anything—“

She was talking too much again but also this was important, and when Hyuuga leaned in and kissed her again she sighed, a little, against his mouth. They might have to draw some lines, she thought—distractedly, because Hyuuga’s teeth grazed her lower lip and. She really very much did not want to draw any lines—but they were going to have to draw some lines, because it wouldn’t do to have him undercut her authority like this anywhere but here—not specifically Kiyoshi’s apartment, although she meant that as well, but here as in the shared space of their shared revelations. This new bubble they were carving out, not hers or Kiyoshi’s but Hyuuga’s, the space he’d pulled them both into with his hands and his lips and his love.

They’d asked him to make a choice, and he’d chosen, in true Hyuuga fashion, unexpectedly and with more perfect, understanding precision than she could ever have imagined.

“I didn’t say anything because a blind fucking monkey could see you two were still head-over-heels for each other, broken up or not,” Hyuuga said as he pulled back from her, his voice fierce. “I wasn’t going to do anything to hurt either of you,” he said, “not ever, not if I could help it, and I thought if I acted on my feelings for either of you, that.” He swallowed. “I thought I hurt you today,” he said to Riko, “and it was the worst feeling I’ve ever felt.”

She stepped further into that bubble, curling in to embrace him, her face buried in his neck, and resolved never to tell him how she’d cried. “I’m sorry we never said anything.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Hyuuga said quietly, wrapping the arm that wasn’t across Kiyoshi’s shoulders around hers. She felt—god, she felt solid, even as everything was so unreal, pulled out of a waiting state she’d been in for so, so long.

Kiyoshi’s fingers were still tangled in hers, his thumb swiping slow across her knuckles: _I know, I know, I know._

She pulled away from Hyuuga to look at Kiyoshi, suddenly wanting desperately to see his happiness without the shadow of her loss. He stared back, his face incredulous, like nothing had quite sunk in yet, and she couldn’t help but grin wide at him.

Kiyoshi shook his head. “I was so sure I was going to lose,” he said. “I was this close—“ he held his fingers about an inch apart—“to just gracefully stepping aside to wallow in my misery, and then I saw Kuroko-kun and Kagami-kun and I—“ he shook his head. “I couldn’t anymore.“ He looked up at Hyuuga. “When you asked me if I was jealous today I couldn’t believe it.”

“I asked because I was,” Hyuuga said. “Have been, I—every time I see them I want it to be us.” He scowled. “It was starting to really piss me off.”

“No wonder you’ve been so irritable with Kagami-kun lately,” Riko commented, sinking down on the couch next to Kiyoshi. “I thought it might be something like that.” She smirked, feeling light. “Or both of us had struck out and you were secretly in love with Kuroko-kun.”

Hyuuga laughed at her, open-mouthed and beautiful. “As a matter of fact, I did think about kissing him today,” he said.

Riuko stiffened; at her side she felt Kiyoshi do the same.

Hyuuga grinned. “Only because he gave me good advice about you guys.”

Riko raised an eyebrow. Kuroko was surprisingly wise, when he bothered to be, but she hadn’t realized he had picked up on anything going on between them.

“Really?” Kiyoshi asked, echoing her thoughts.

Hyuuga nodded, and then said with studied casualness, “did you know he’s also dating Aomine?”

They both stared at him for a minute. ”What?” Riko asked.

Kiyoshi said in a small voice, “Aomine Daiki?”, as if there was another one that he might be forgetting about.

Hyuuga smirked, inordinately pleased with himself. “You guys are so cute,” he said, in a theatrical, sugary tone.

Riko punched him in the arm, hard, and Kiyoshi went red and mumbled something indistinct, and it was like riding upward in an elevator, this feeling—Hyuuga’s kiss the moment of weightlessness and now, now, the feeling of _arrival_ , of being where she should be. 

“Teppei,” Hyuuga said, and. That felt right, too. That, too, was as it should be.

Kiyoshi raised his eyebrows at Hyuuga.

Hyuuga smiled at him, a different, new kind of smile, and Riko wanted to lean in and memorize it with her fingers but contented herself with running her eyes across it, again and again, categorizing it as _his_ Teppei smile. She wondered how it compared to hers.

“You and me,” Hyuuga said, “one-on-one.”

Riko shook her head. “Of course you want to play basketball,” she said, rolling her eyes, “of course.”

Hyuuga widened his eyes at her, attempting to look innocent, and Riko doubted there was a single expression he was capable of that wouldn’t make her want to kiss him. “We missed half of practice, coach,” he said, “I’m just trying to keep to the training regimen!”

“Just because you’re our boyfriend now doesn’t mean I won’t kill you,” she snapped, and then flushed hot and then cold, because what if—what if he didn’t want that, “I mean—“

Hyuuga was definitely blushing, now, his cheeks bright.. “Yeah,” he said, quickly, cutting her off, and looked at Kiyoshi. Riko did too, watching him closely. He looked—calm and pleased and certain, the way he’d looked after she’d kissed him back that very first time, trying to shut up the fears in her head. The look that had convinced her she could. The look of a man who could be sure of the future.

“Yeah,” Hyuuga said again, once again giving her voice where she had none, and she kind of. Knew how Kiyoshi felt.

+

She should have known better.

She should known—the real shoe dropped out of nowhere: a manila envelope on her dresser, left there by the long, calloused fingers of a man who taught her everything she knew.

She should have known better.

The real shoe left her curled in the corner of her bed, staring up at the ceiling, being certain of nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This literally took months to get anywhere I was even SLIGHTLY happy with it; that's what happens when you put too much pressure on yourself to make something really really good. As always, let me know what you think, either here or at flightlesscrowkids dot tumblr dot com. And—seriously, thank you, thank you, thank you. The response to this series has blown me away.
> 
> This part brings us up through the entirety of [Your Fonder Heart](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3183935)! WHAT COULD BE NEXT
> 
> Also - as a note, this series in general acts as if the Uncrowned Kings actually played all together as a team in middle school, because it. Doesn't make any sense that they didn't. Cool? Cool.


	2. Chapter 2

Hyuuga Junpei was probably the most quietly determined person Riko had ever met. It made him an excellent captain, and, she was quickly discovering, a simultaneously frustrating and lovely boyfriend.

He never bothered her when she was thinking hard about something. He wanted to—she could see it in his face, in the way his eyebrows were just slightly twitched inward over his pretty grey-green eyes. But he didn’t ask. He just watched, and waited for her to come to the end of her calculations. 

Usually it made her smile. Today, it kind of made her want to cry, because no matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t see an answer—or. She could. She just didn’t like it.

Riko crossed to where he was sitting shirtless on her bed, his hands loose at his knees. He had a sports magazine on his lap but he hadn’t turned a page in a long time, abandoning it in favor of watching her work at her desk. Leaning in, she kissed him between the eyebrows, trying to smooth away his waiting look. It wouldn’t work; she knew that he would just continue to wait, and wonder, and respect her, and be maddeningly, silently, perfectly determined to find out what was on her mind. 

He made a little disgruntled noise and she chuckled against his skin. “We should go.” 

He skimmed his hands up her sides and down again. “Do we have to? Can’t we just get him to come here?” 

Riko bit her lip. They were still kind of working out the—kinks, Izuki said in her mind, and she made a mental note to slap him next time she saw him—the _details_ of how the relationship between the three of them worked, including the, um. Sexual ones. She and Teppei had never really gotten further than heated make-outs and some furtive exploration, the first time around (his hands were huge and amazing; she could probably compose songs to his hands and she knew Hyuuga would sing harmony in a heartbeat) and having Hyuuga in the mix was both very, very exciting and a little bit terrifying. 

She wanted—she wanted to have Teppei come here. Almost more, she wanted to just tip Hyuuga backwards and continue to figure him out on her own. He was so—angular, so much more built of corners and lines, and she wanted, wanted to explore him with her hands and her mouth, wanted to know him in bed the way she knew him on the court. She pulled back to look at him, and saw the same mirrored desire—for her, for them both and, importantly, for just her—in his face. 

She kissed him, and he deepened it, pulling her lower lip into his mouth. She flicked her tongue against his once before pulling away and taking a breath. “We should,” she said. “My dad will be home soon.” 

Hyuuga grimaced without opening his eyes. “I can’t wait until you’re out of this house.”

Riko stepped back from him, swallowing, because that was—too close to all the things in her head she couldn’t let him see, not yet. “He’s not so bad,” she said, nudging, nudging him away into safer waters.

Hyuuga opened his eyes already scowling. “He’s a creep, Riko, he—“ 

She stopped him with a hand on his chest. “He’s my father,” she said firmly. “And your coach, show some respect.”

He took her hand in his, shifted it, a little, until it was pressed over his beating heart. “He’s not my coach,” he said softly, eyes soft green-grey-brown, like young moss, new growth. “You are.”

Riko swallowed, her cheeks heating. “Put a shirt on,” she said shortly, but it took another minute before she could bring herself to move her hand.  
   
On the way to the mall he caught it again, brought it briefly to his lips, and then held it, walking along at her side like—like they were dating. Which they were—they _were_ , but. Sometimes she still felt weird and shaky about it, when Teppei wasn’t around, still felt like Hyuuga must have made some kind of mistake—was about to pull the rug out from her feet. That the kiss he’d planted on the corner of Teppei’s bemused smile had been the kiss he _meant_ , and hers was—afterthought, guilt, obligation.

She shivered, the wind tugging at her wrists and throat, and Hyuuga used his grip on her hand to pull her closer, shielding her from the worst of it.

“I need new running gear,” she mused. Distracting him was never going to work if she didn’t distract herself—he lived too much in her brain for that, was too in tune with her moods. “Let me see your phone, I’ll text Teppei to meet us there.” She would have used hers but it would have involved letting go of his hand to get it out of her bag, and she didn’t want to.

Hyuuga nodded, not questioning it, and dug his phone out of his pocket with his free hand, tossing it to her. She caught it in her own free hand and flipped it open, scrolling to Teppei in his contacts. He was still listed under “Kiyoshi >:[", but the last few texts in their conversation were completely different than they would have been a few months ago.

 _god. unfair to do this when i’m stuck home writing a paper_ was the last thing Hyuuga had said, and Riko raised an eyebrow, scrolled up, and read a conversation in reverse that made her mouth go dry.

She stopped at the picture. She was pretty sure it would have taken more self-control than her small body possessed not to stop at the picture.

It was Teppei, naked—or if not naked he had his boxers pushed far enough down his hips that she could see the first few curls of his pubic hair and no sign of a waistband—seen from below, his cheeks flushed with embarrassment, the hand not holding his phone curled around the back of his neck so his biceps and chest were on full display. It was a little blurry—he wasn’t very good at this, not very practiced—but it didn’t matter. The yellow light of his bathroom—Riko had been in that bathroom, they’d made out in that bathroom—picked out the definition in his muscles just fine.

 _fucking hell,_ Hyuuga had said in reply. _that angle’s just a dick move._

 _dick move?_ Teppei’d replied. _did i accidentally send this to Izuki?_

 _he wishes,_ Hyuuga’d countered. _anyone would wish._

A few minutes, and then Teppei: _I used to think about it. what you’d look like, looking up at me. my hands in your hair._

Riko swallowed. She’d stopped walking, at some point—probably the same point at which she’d stopped scrolling, and Hyuuga said, “Riko? You okay?”

_only used to? what, you only like forbidden fruit?_

She couldn’t stop—imagining Teppei’s face as he received these texts, embarrassed and determined and turned on. Moving from the bathroom to the bedroom, lounging against his pillows. _no. i just wanted you to know how long i’ve wanted you._

She’d reached the end, looped back around to that last text. Hyuuga had stepped up to her side, taken her hand and his phone both in his palm so he could read over her shoulder. “Oh,” he said, and when she looked up at him sideways his cheeks were flushed dark. “Did you, um.”

Riko licked her lips. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t have the right—“

He blinked at her. “What? Of course you do.”

She shook her head, pressing the phone back into his hand. “It’s not—he didn’t send me that picture. You know? That was for you, I don’t want to intrude—“

“Riko,” he said, his brow furrowing, “is this what’s been bothering you, you feel like you’re intruding?”

She—wanted to laugh, at how backward that was, how simultaneously right and wrong he was. “No,” she reassured him. “No way.” She looked up at him through her lashes. “Has—has it happened? Have you—?”

Hyuuga looked down at his phone, typing out the message to Teppei for her. He gave a little half-cough of embarrassment. “No,” he said. “We haven’t. Done anything that you don’t know about, except.”

She raised her eyebrows at him, licked her lips. “Except?”

Hyuuga ran a hand through his hair. “He—called me. After that last text. And. We talked.”

Riko bit the inside of her cheek, hard, because _that_ was a mental image she wasn’t going to forget in a hurry. “Shit,” she said. “That’s—hot as hell.”

He stared at her. “Really?”

She made a face at him, reaching out to catch his hand, and started walking again. “No,” she deadpanned. “Imagining my two incredibly hot boyfriends getting themselves off to each other over the phone does absolutely nothing for me, sexually.”

Hyuuga made a tiny choking noise. “Riko—“

She grinned at him. “I like being able to scandalize you.”

He grinned back, his cheeks still bright. “I like being scandalized.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “Is that so?”

His smile faded, and he narrowed his eyes at her, wary. “That’s your planning voice.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “Maybe,” she said, but he was right. The cogs of her brain were spinning; she would have to gauge the atmosphere once Teppei was here, but she was pretty sure she’d just come up with an absolutely _wonderful_ idea.

“You two look happy.”

“Speak of the devil,” Hyuuga muttered, and they turned to look at their boyfriend, approaching the doors of the mall from the other side. He had a long scarf wrapped around his neck and he looked tall and adult and quite happy himself, his mouth curled in a little smile, fond and new, not a smile for either of them but a smile for them both. 

“Aw,” he said, “were you talking about me?”

“Of course not,” Riko said tartly, putting away her wonderful idea behind a separate door from all her circular, frustrating thoughts and closing it firmly. “Are we ever, Junpei?”

“Nope,” said Hyuuga, and cocked his head a little so Teppei could lean down and kiss his cheek. His fingers were still laced with Riko’s, and he made no move to do anything about it. 

Teppei made a little mournful moue of his mouth as he straightened up. “What did I do to deserve such mean—“ he stopped, and then narrowed his eyes. “Hm.”

Riko sighed and lead the way into the mall. “Are we having another linguistic problem?”

Teppei nodded slowly. “I supposed I could say _significant others_ but it’s so clunky, and having to say _boyfriend and girlfriend_ every time is even worse. _Lovers_ sounds like we’re out of some harem romance, and _partners_ is like we’re starting a business—“

“Soulmates,” Hyuuga suggested, almost under his breath, his voice embarrassed.

Riko tensed. “No,” she said immediately.

She felt them both look at her curiously, but stared straight ahead, making a beeline for the sports store. She shrugged, trying to keep it casual. “I don’t believe in soulmates,” she said, as lightly as she could. “For one thing, you’re only supposed to have the one, and we’ve already proved _that’s_ bullshit.”

Kiyoshi laughed softly. “True,” he said, and Riko forced herself to relax. Slowly—through the tips of her fingers—she felt Hyuuga relax, too, although he kept watching her out of the corner of his eye.

“Anyway,” Riko said, to make him smile, “just call us, like, your better thirds, or something.”

Hyuuga nodded, his lips curling. “There are two of us and we’re better than you, so.”

Kiyoshi shook his head, his eyes warm and happy. “Like I said. _Mean_.”

They stopped in front of the sports store and Riko let go of Hyuuga’s hand to check her phone for the brand of gear she was looking for. “Mostly I need new shorts,” she said, “my old ones slide right off my hips, the elastic’s so shot.”

Kiyoshi touched the small of her back and indicated a pair on a mannequin further down the storefront. “What about those ones?”

Riko bent to look at them, and Kiyoshi said to Hyuuga, low but loud enough for them both to hear, “Maybe she could give her old ones to you, you’d look good in shorts that short.” His voice got a little wickeder. “Especially if they really do slide right off.”

Riko looked up so she could watch Hyuuga go a beautiful shade of red. “Bold,” she commented to Kiyoshi.

He flushed, as well, although he tended toward pink rather than Hyuuga’s lobster. “I—might’ve scrolled up in a certain text conversation on the way over so I’m a little, um.”

Riko straightened, nodding. “I read it,” she said. 

“Oh,” said Kiyoshi in a small voice, his cheeks going even pinker. “Good.”

Riko looked at him carefully. _Is it?_ she wanted to ask, but there was no sign of any discomfort with her having seen, or any offense that she’d read a private conversation. “It gave me an idea,” she said, slowly, still watching him. “You know, I can buy this stuff another day.”

Kiyoshi licked his lips, his gaze caught on her face like a fish on a hook. “O-oh?”

Riko nodded. “Anyone around at your place right now?”

Kiyoshi shook his head—there rarely was. Riko gnawed at a bit of her lip. “Okay,” she said, “um. Good.” She looked at Hyuuga, who was staring at her with the same kind of hopeful trepidation that she felt herself, and then back to Kiyoshi again. “Do you—“

“Yes,” he said, and Hyuuga was nodding, too, his throat bobbing as he swallowed. 

“Good,” Riko said again, and as one they turned and left the mall, walking the way that Kiyoshi had come.

She opened Kiyoshi’s door with her key—Hyuuga had his in his hand, and, that, there was something in that that she didn’t have time to work through, an element of evolution, parallel; something lovely and sad all at once, a space shared that once was not—and along with it she opened the door in her head, the wonderful door with the wonderful plan, and lead the way directly to Kiyoshi’s bedroom and then turned on her heel to look at her boyfriends.

They’d stopped just inside the bedroom door, watching her, and she bit her lip, her stomach suddenly tight with nervousness. “Okay,” she said. “Teppei.”

He licked his lips. “Coach,” he said, and she grinned at him, because he got it—of course he got it. 

“Take off your scarf,” she said, “and your coat.” 

Kiyoshi obeyed, slinging the outerwear on the end of his bed, and Riko watched him, watched Hyuuga watch him. “Keep going,” she suggested when Kiyoshi paused, his fingers at the hem of his shirt, and first Kiyoshi and then Hyuuga took a visible breath, pushing their ribs outward against the same nerves she felt. The muscles in Kiyoshi's chest shifted as he tossed his shirt aside, and Hyuuga tucked his hands in his pockets, movements abrupt.

“Junpei,” Riko said, looking at him. “I think our Iron Heart wants to be kissed, don’t you?”

Hyuuga went a little wide-eyed. “Yeah,” he said, and stepped forward, and—she’d meant on the mouth, just as a way to get things started, but as usual he took her plan and perfected it—ducked his head and pressed his open mouth to Kiyoshi’s chest, above his heart. Kiyoshi made a small noise like “oh,” and let his hands settle in Hyuuga’s hair, his fingers shifting and his eyelids fluttering as Hyuuga mouthed and kissed his way up his throat to his lips.

Riko slid back so she could perch on his bed, one hand tangled in her shirt, her mouth dry. “Yeah,” she said as Kiyoshi opened his mouth to Hyuuga’s tongue, pushing his glasses up into his hair. Hyuuga’s hands went to Kiyoshi’s waist, his lower back, sliding over the muscle there. “Yeah, that’s.”

Hyuuga kissed his way over to Kiyoshi’s ear, and Kiyoshi opened his eyes to look at her. “You’re, mmh, so far away,” he said, almost plaintive.

She shook her head. “I’m not staying over here,” she reassured him. “I just—I wanna see what you would have done if you’d been together, rather than on the phone.”

Hyuuga said, “ _shit_ ,” into the joint of Kiyoshi’s shoulder and neck, and Kiyoshi swallowed hard. “Oh,” he said, voice trying toward ironic but not quite making it, “is—is that all?”

Riko beamed at him, her face hot, her body on, on constant high alert, the little catches of Kiyoshi's breath when Hyuuga scraped teeth against his skin sending little pleasant shocks through her. “Junpei,” she said, “I think you heard that, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Hyuuga, his voice tugged lovely and low, and he kissed his way down Kiyoshi’s chest again, lingering, in no hurry. Riko bit her lip and slid a hand under her shirt, tracing her fingers across the muscles of her stomach. As Hyuuga kissed his way down she traced her fingertips up, under the cups of her bra, and when he latched his lips around Kiyoshi’s nipple she punched and tugged at her own, gasping in unison with her boyfriend.

Kiyoshi’s eyes snapped to hers, and his lips parted. “Riko,” he breathed.

She bit her lip, flicking her thumb over her nipple again, cupping her breast in her palm, and Hyuuga did something clever with his mouth because Kiyoshi twitched, his breath completely unsteady. 

“You should bite him,” Riko suggested quietly. “He likes it.”

Kiyoshi went even pinker. “R-riko— _oh, gh_ —“ and Hyuuga pulled back with a grin, examining the spit-slick skin he’d left behind. He glanced at her, proud of himself, and froze when he saw her hand working under her shirt, her other fisted tight in her skirt, her knees twitched together. Before she could command him to do otherwise, he’d crossed to her, leaning down and capturing her mouth.

She kissed him back—too drunk on the feeling of lips and teeth and tongue not to—but mumbled, “you’ve got a mission, Junpei,” when he let her.

“I know,” he said against her mouth, “I know, and I want it so bad, but you—“ he made a frustrated noise, his hands going to the hem of her shirt and under it. “At least let me get this off—“

She relented, helping him pull it over her head, shivering when he ran his hands down her shoulders and arms like he was just—appreciating the shape of her. He stepped back to look. The straps of her bra were slipping down her biceps, and she almost fixed them but thought better of it, sliding them off her arms entirely instead and unhooking the bra. She tossed it away and brought her hands back up to her breasts, flicking her fingers over her nipples and shivering at the way his throat bobbed—at the way Kiyoshi murmured her name. “Go on,” she said to Hyuuga. “Let me see your daydreams.”

He held her eyes. “You’re not just watching them,” he said, his voice rough, “you’re _being_ them.”

Riko felt her cheeks heat, and she licked her lips.

Hyuuga pulled his eyes off her with an effort, returning to Kiyoshi. Without pause—without even stopping his forward momentum, he kissed him—rocking him back on his feet a little—and Riko could see their tongues, could see Hyuuga licking into Kiyoshi’s mouth, could see the way it sent shivers through Kiyoshi’s whole body. She swallowed hard, shifting one of her hands down from her chest to toy with the waistline of her skirt. 

Hyuuga was all motion—pulling back from Kiyoshi’s mouth to sink directly to his knees, and Kiyoshi murmured “oh, _fuck,_ ” as Hyuuga’s hands worked at his fly. Riko slid her fingers beneath her skirt as Hyuuga pushed Kiyoshi’s pants down his legs, leaned in to nuzzle the line of his hip. Kiyoshi fisted his hands in Hyuuga’s hair.

“Did you think about this?” Riko asked, hearing her own voice come out breathless, sliding her fingertips slow down the soft front of her underwear. “About how he would taste?”

“Yeah,” said Hyuuga, quick and sharp, and bit the flesh of Kiyoshi’s thigh. Kiyoshi had one hand on Hyuuga’s head, the other over half his face, like he was trying to hold himself together. He twitched, and Hyuuga raised a hand as if to steady him but cupped his still-covered dick instead. Riko pressed her fingertips harder against herself, rhythmic, still—teasing, she didn’t want to lose herself in sensation enough to close her eyes.

“Yeah,” Hyuuga continued, his fingers tracing the outline of Kiyoshi’s cock almost absently. “And I—I thought about,” he said, and swallowed, “about you doing this, Riko.”

Riko bit at the inside of her cheek. “I haven’t,” she confessed.

Hyuuga looked at her, and then up at Kiyoshi. “So—“

Kiyoshi was bright red behind his hand. “You, um. You’ll be the first.”

“Shit,” Hyuuga breathed. “Oh—shit, I. I’ve never done this before—“

“Stop worrying,” Riko commanded. “Don’t psych yourself out.” She licked her lips, couldn’t stop looking at the slow constant trace of Hyuuga’s long fingers against Kiyoshi’s underwear. “Clutch time,” she said softly.

He shot a glance at her like he wanted to glare, or laugh, but his eyes zeroed in on the hand working slow and steady between her legs and he muttered, “ _fuck_ ,” instead, “fuck, Riko—let me see—“

She swallowed hard. That wasn’t—this wasn’t the point. But. She raised her eyes to Kiyoshi to see him staring at her as well, despite Hyuuga on his knees right in front of him, and he met her eyes. “Please,” he said, sounding embarrassed but firm. “I—probably won’t be able to deal with it, but. Please.”

A little hesitant but lifted up by the combined need in their gazes, she hopped to her feet, slipping her underwear and her skirt both off and letting them fall to the floor. She ran a hand down her stomach and over her hip, trying to reforge the instinct to _cover_ into the instinct to _display_. It was only when she sat back down and slid her hand back to where it had been, her fingers slipping through her curls to lightly touch her lips, that she raised her eyes again, her whole face and throat radiating the heat of her blush.

Hyuuga made a motion as if to get up, and she snapped, “Priorities,” at him, because she—couldn’t. Wasn’t ready to be touched, yet, needed to. See.

“Riko,” said Kiyoshi, “you—really have no idea—“

Hyuuga shook his head. “None,” he said. “Just—fuck.”

“Stop dawdling,” said Riko, but she was nothing but two points of warmth, spreading outward from the touch of her fingers and the beat of her heart. She saw Hyuuga take a breath, square back up with Kiyoshi’s hips, saw him pluck at the waistband Kiyoshi’s boxers. He looked up at her other boyfriend, his face flushed and wanting and wondering. “Can I—“

Kiyoshi slid the hand on his head down to cup his jaw. “Please,” he said, unsteady, his voice low with want. “Yes.”

Hyuuga swallowed again and leaned in, rolling Kiyoshi’s boxers off slow and latching his mouth slow onto the skin he revealed, and Riko felt like her heart might be smashing through her chest. Her fingers shifted slicker and slicker against herself, the idea that breath could even be steady a far-off memory as Hyuuga worked his way downward until Kiyoshi’s dick slipped free. He wrapped a hand around it almost just to steady it, not pulling his mouth back from Kiyoshi’s skin at all, and Kiyoshi flung a hand out to steady himself, managed to slam it too hard into the wall. “ _Junpei_.”

Hyuuga pulled back a little, glancing up at him, and then—very briefly—at Riko, and Riko’s mouth was so, so dry. “Go on,” she said, not entirely certain that he’d been asking for direction, but Kiyoshi let out a low moan, and she took a breath, shifting her hips harder against her fingers. “Go on,” she said again, “use your tongue.”

Hyuuga reached up and took off his glasses, setting them carefully on the floor next to him. He took a breath, his eyelids fluttering, and then he leaned in to lick a long stripe up the length of Kiyoshi’s dick.

Kiyoshi’s hand spasmed against the wall. “Oh,” he said, lost, “oh, _fuck_ —“

Hyuuga did it again, one of his hands touching and guiding Kiyoshi’s cock into his mouth, the other wrapped hard around Kiyoshi’s hip, and Kiyoshi was curled over him, his hand shifting in Hyuuga’s hair, his breath—like Riko’s—torn and ragged and staccato. “God, shit,” he snapped, and Riko bit her lip so hard she tasted iron, slipping her fingers along her slick folds and up to her clit, working it between her fingers. Hyuuga licked him again and then opened his mouth, sinking forward as far as he could, and Riko slid her fingers into herself, her mouth opening soundless.

It was—almost too much, almost too much visual to have when she was feeling so much, but she kept her eyes open as long as she could, watching the length of Kiyoshi’s cock disappear between Hyuuga’s lips, watching the way his body trembled, trembled, trembled. Her own body trembled with him, and her eyelids fluttered, and she could _hear_ it—the slick rhythm of Hyuuga’s mouth, the broken half-curses that dropped from Kiyoshi’s loose lips, her own fingers, all—shifting in and out of each other, a quick-tap drumbeat in a too-quiet room. She felt herself building, building, her breath catching, losing anything that wasn’t her, and them, and her in response to them, losing thought in the racking waves of pure _feeling._

She wasn’t even aware of closing her eyes until there were fingers around her wrist—Teppei’s fingers, she’d know them anywhere, and she tried instinctively to fight him—she was so close, what was he doing—until she felt another pair of hands on her knees, pushing them gently apart, and Hyuuga pressed a kiss to the inside of her knee. She pried her eyes open to stare down at him, at the redness of his mouth, at the darkness of his eyes.

“Can I—“ he started, and before she’d even finished her desperate nod was shifting forward, running his hands forward, and the first slow swipe of his tongue made her slam her eyes shut again, made her toes curl in her shoes, made her breath leave her lungs in a little squeaking cry. Kiyoshi brought her fingers to his lips, cleaning them, sucking lightly at their tips and Riko—oh, _oh_ —Riko clutched at his jaw, Hyuuga’s tongue working quick and certain against her.

“Riko,” Kiyoshi said against the pulse-point of her wrist, and Hyuuga flickered his tongue faster, and Riko was—gone.

Hyuuga kissed her through it, his mouth loose and soft against the skin of her thighs, only moved away away when she fisted her free hand in his hair and pulled him upward. She kissed him almost unintentionally—mouth drawn to mouth, inexorable—and tasted herself, tasted him, tasted something that must be Kiyoshi, and that realization sent another shock of sensation through her, made her gasp into his mouth. Kiyoshi settled on the bed next to her, curled around her, ran a hand down her side and over her hip, and she squirmed backward so she could properly lie down with him, pulling Hyuuga with them with the hand in his hair.

They curled there, breathing hard, the silence of Kiyoshi’s apartment filtering back in around them. Hyuuga ran the tips of his fingers up her body, over her ribs, between her breasts, brushed them over her collarbone, and she shivered, still feeling like the edges of herself might crumble away, might be gone already. Kiyoshi pressed a kiss to her temple, and she turned toward him, her hand going to his jaw again, tracing the wide line of his smile. “Hey,” she said, and laughed.

“Hey,” he said, and kissed the tips of her fingers. “Hey.”

Hyuuga reached across her to take Kiyoshi’s hand, and Riko tried to concentrate on the lock of their fingers, tried to think, _yes_ , tried to think, _that’s the point,_ the clasp of their hands together without her, not the way they’re curled to either side, bracketing her flyaway pieces, keeping her whole.

+

Riko waited for Kuroko on the sidelines, bouncing on her toes a little. When he started passing her she reached out and touched his shoulder. “Can I talk to you for a minute, Kuroko-kun?”

He turned, a little surprised. “Of course, Riko-san. What’s up?”

Riko regarded him with her head on one side. “Have you ever used your misdirection for evil?”

Kuroko stared at her. “Evil?”

Riko flapped a hand at him. “Not, like, _actual_ evil, I’m not accusing you of murder or anything, I just mean like—stuff that’s not particularly within the so-called “rules”. Not of basketball! I’m not accusing you of cheating, either. But like. The rules of school, for example.”

Kuroko narrowed his eyes, his lips curling a little in amusement. “I thought you said you weren’t accusing me of cheating.”

Riko sighed. Of course he was going to make her spell it out. “I want you to steal the draft of the schedule for next year’s classes.”

Kuroko blinked at her. “What? Why?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Riko said. “All that matters is that it’s important. Can you do it?”

Kuroko considered. “Probably,” he said. “I would need to know where it’s kept, and someone to stand guard.”

Riko nodded. “It’s in the faculty offices. Mr. Arisatou probably has it, he’s usually the one finalizing stuff like that.”

Kuroko nodded, his little smile growing. “Glad I could help you out. Though if you’re planning any larger-scale criminal activity, I’ll need a head’s up so I can get a catsuit.”

Riko caught sight of Aomine over Kuroko’s shoulder, looking loose-limbed and kind of lost on the Seirin sidelines. “I know someone who would appreciate that,” she said archly, and Kuroko didn’t even look—just folded his lips into his mouth like he was trying to hide his smile.

“Oh,” said Riko. “That’s another thing—don’t tell my boyfriends we’re doing this. Cool? In fact, go talk to them now and make up some lie about what we’re talking about so they don’t get suspicious.”

Kuroko gave her a kind of curious, measuring look, but finally nodded and went to join Hyuuga and Kiyoshi where they were talking by the bench.

Riko looked around for Kagami, but still only saw Aomine. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he raised a hand in an awkward sort of wave.

She crossed to him. “Aomine-kun,” she greeted, adjusting her glasses. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

Aomine scowled at her. “What’re you talking about? You were just talking to him.”

Riko blinked, and then flapped a hand. “Oh, no, I meant Kagami.”

Aomine stared at her. “Kagami’s not my boyfriend.”

“Oh,” said Riko, and then frowned. That didn’t make any sense, not with what Hyuuga had told her and Kiyoshi. Not with how they acted. “I thought you guys were—y’know, I thought you were like us.”

“Like you,” Aomine said slowly, like he had no idea what she meant.

“Kuroko hasn’t told you?” Riko asked, surprised. “But it was his advice that made it happen in the first place. We’re all dating, Junpei and Teppei and I.” She cocked her head. “So you and Kuroko, and obviously Kuroko and Kagami, but not the two of you?”

Aomine licked his lips, looking a little pissed that she was even still talking to him. “No,” he said. “Not us.”

Riko was about to say something else, but caught sight of Kagami behind Aomine, and raised her eyebrows, watching as he wandered comfortably up and draped himself like a giant affectionate ape across Aomine’s shoulders. Aomine relaxed into him immediately, probably unconsciously.

“Yo, idiot,” Kagami said, and Aomine turned his head a little, Kagami’s lips nearly brushing his cheek.

“What,” he said flatly. He twitched like he was going to shove Kagami off, but caught Riko’s eye and stopped, maybe fearing—what was that phrase? English. Shakespeare. The lady denies too much. 

“Kuroko wants to go to the record store later,” Kagami said. “You in?”

“Sure,” Aomine said, not looking at Riko’s face.

Kagami gave a satisfied hum and removed his arm. “Seeya, coach,” he said, and wandered away.

Riko watched him go. “Not you two,” she said quietly, because yeah fucking right. “Does he know that?”

Aomine glared at her. She smirked, undaunted, and then jogged after Kagami.

“Oi, Kagami-kun,” she called. 

He turned, looking surprised. “Coach?”

She slowed as she caught up to him, raising an eyebrow. “Things going well there?” she asked, jerking her head toward Aomine. 

Kagami blinked at her, and then at Aomine, and then looked back at her, his cheeks shading the tiniest bit pink. “Well enough,” he muttered. “He’s—“ he cut himself off, grimacing.

“An idiot,” she supplied easily, and touched his arm. “But I wouldn’t worry.”

“Thanks,” Kagami said, voice embarrassed. “Um, did you need something—“

Riko nodded. “I asked your boy—not that one, the other one—to do something a little shady for me, and I was hoping you’d watch his back.”

Kagami blinked at her. “Always,” he said, and then smiled, just the smallest bit—warm and fond and amused. “Though sometimes it’s a little hard to see.”

Riko grinned at him. “Thanks,” she said, “I really appreciate it.” She turned away, and then stopped, biting her lip. “Also—sometime, could I—could I ask you about America?”

Kagami frowned at her, confused. “Uh, sure. Any time.” He looked at her a little more closely. “You okay?”

Riko nodded sharply, shaking off the weight of his gaze. “Fine, fine,” she lied. “Just have some stuff to think about.”

Kagami watched her for another minute, and then nodded. “You can talk to me any time,” he said quietly. “About America, or whatever else.”

She smiled at him, feeling very fragile beneath her skin. What did she do to deserve these boys? This whole team of boys, buoying her up and caring about her and being there in ways she never ever expected?

“Thanks,” she said, quiet and sincere.

+

 _Real medicine,_ her father had said, brushing her hair from her forehead. _My Riko, a real doctor._

 _This is huge for us,_ he’d said. _You make me so proud._

+

She could hear voices from the hallway as she approached Kagami’s apartment, and when she turned the corner she saw Yosen’s Himuro Tatsuya, his hands in his pockets, standing talking softly to Kagami’s ex-coach Alex Garcia, who was leaning in the doorway in an oversize t-shirt and not much else. Riko went red and took a step back, tempted to hide behind the corner until the coast was clear, or just leave altogether—but Himuro had seen her, his eyebrows going up. She reversed direction and tried to stride up to them with a little more confidence. “Himuro-kun, right?”

He raised a hand in greeting. “Riko-san.”

Alex smiled, in the doorway. “Seirin’s cute coach,” she said. “How are you?”

“Good,” said Riko vaguely, “um. Is Kagami home?”

Alex shook her head. “He wouldn’t be here if he was,” she said, nodding to Himuro, “because boys are stupid, even mine.”

Himuro let out a sigh that was halfway to a laugh. “I should probably get going, actually,” he said. “Alex, I—“ He rolled his shoulders. “Thanks.”

Alex raised an eyebrow at him. “I would say you’re welcome if I thought you’d actually take my advice instead of just asking for it and then ignoring me,” she said, but there was nothing but fondness in her voice. “Don’t be a stranger.”

Himuro kissed her on the forehead, gave Riko a nod, and wandered off down the hall.

“So,” Alex said, opening the door for Riko and beckoning her inside, “what do you need Taiga for?”

“Actually, um,” Riko said, “You could also help me, if you don’t mind me asking a few questions?”

“Shoot,” Alex said, and there was something in her tone that reminded Riko so much of Izuki that she had to laugh. “You want some tea?”

“Oh, um—that’d be nice,” said Riko, coming to sit at Kagami’s kitchen counter. She watched Alex move around the apartment, still half-dressed, looking for all the world like she lived there. It was a good thing Kagami wasn’t into women—or sex at all, for that matter—because otherwise Riko might have to pry him out of this apartment with a crowbar to get him on the court. She was pretty sure she’d never leave if this is what it was like every day. She cleared her throat. “What, uh—what’s it like?” she asked. “America?”

Alex raised her eyebrows and turned on the stove. “Big,” she said. “Varied. You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

Riko stared at her hands. “School,” she said finally. “Medical school.”

Alex whistled. “Hard, mostly,” she said, “and long. I don’t know from any personal experience, but you have to do a bunch of different stages—pre-med, medical school, a practical internship and residency at an approved hospital.”

“Oh,” said Riko, her heart sinking. “So—you wouldn’t recommend, like.” She swallowed hard. “Trying to. Continue a relationship w-with someone in Japan, if you were. To go there.”

Alex raised an eyebrow at her. “That would have to be some damn relationship for me to even want to.”

Riko fisted her hands against her knees. “It is,” she said fiercely. “But.”

Alex crossed her arms and watched her for a long moment. “I’m doing the long-distance thing now,” she said. “My girl’s back in L.A.”

Riko blinked at her. “You have a girlfriend?”

Alex grinned. “Fiancee,” she said. “What, you surprised she lets me kiss half of Japan?”

Riko felt herself blush. “A little,” she admitted.

Alex raised a shoulder in a half-shrug. “As I was just discussing with poor Tatsuya, the boundaries you work out with people you care about are completely different among different people. What’s inappropriate for some people could be standard practice for others. Hell, what even counts as romantic for one relationship could be nothing but friendship for another—or vice versa.” She turned to pull the kettle off the heat the instant it started boiling. “Rachel knows I don’t kiss people because I love or want them. I do it because it’s fun.”

Riko watched as she poured the tea. “Is it hard?” she asked. “The. Long-distance.”

Alex slid the steaming cup toward her. “Yeah,” she said, “and I’ve only been away a few weeks.”

Riko wrapped her hands around the teacup, pressing her palms against the too-hot porcelain. 

Alex watched her for a minute. “You’re young,” she said. “Sometimes—“

“—you have to let the things you love go, right?” Riko interrupted her. “And if they’re real—if they were meant to be, they’ll come back?” She bit her lip, her mouth going bitter with unshed tears. “But what if they—what if you let them go, and they go on without you, what if—“

Alex shook her head, leaning across the table, her hair falling across her shoulders and her eyes earnest. “That’s not what I was going to say,” she said. “I was going to say—you’re young. Sometimes it’s okay to _be_ young.”

Riko’s alarm on her phone went off—the reminder said _buy groceries_ —and she silenced it with fingers that still smarted from the heat of her cup. She thought of her father, sitting home by now, his hands loose and wandering at his sides.

“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know how.”

+

“Junpei! C’mon!”

Hyuuga let himself out his front door, running a hand through his nearly-dry hair. Her own was still wet, making her shiver in the cooling air, but it was important that they get to Kiyoshi’s soon, she wanted to have to time to go over everything before she had to head home.

He jogged down his steps, smiling at her, and held out a hand, which she took, threading their fingers together tight. “I don’t even know where we’re going,” he complained.

She rolled her eyes fondly. “A, where do you think we’re going? and B, do you really need to?”

His thumb slid over her knuckles. “No,” he said. “I’d follow you anywhere.”

She swallowed, hard, and he smiled at her again—a different kind of smile, tentative, unsure, like maybe he’d put himself too far out on a limb, and she leaned up to kiss the edge of his mouth, not letting herself linger. Not letting him. Pulled down and away from his mouth by the weights hooked into her heart.

God. She’d spent so much of her life learning the language of bodies—the interplay between mind and muscle, the importance of morale—and here she was letting her emotion change her movements, letting it make her too abrupt, too changeable, too frenetic, even as she kept every hint of it out of her voice. This couldn’t last.

Sooner or later, he’d know.

“I have a present for you,” she said abruptly.

He slowed, surprised. “You do?”

She nodded, skipping ahead so he had to jog to catch up. Always keep them on their toes. “One for each of you,” she said.

He looked sideways at her, dubious. “It’s not food, is it? Because—“

She smacked him in the shoulder. “Don’t be an asshole.”

But even with Hyuuga’s teeth sunk so deep, it was Teppei—always Teppei—who figured it out.

She laid the folders out in front of her boyfriends on his kitchen table, one for each of them. Hyuuga looked unimpressed, flipping it open. “What is this? I thought you said these were presents.”

She kicked him under the table. “They are,” she said. “I had Kuroko-kun steal the class schedule for next year, and I made you guys plans. For—the classes you should take, the things you should spend your time studying.”

Kiyoshi blinked at her. “Should? Why?”

She took a breath, smiling at him. “For university,” she said. “To get your grades up, and to get into school. The same school, in Tokyo.” She looked back and forth between them. “They’ve got a great history department, and Teppei, you mentioned when you were in the hospital that you might be interested in sports medicine, in helping people who’d injured themselves doing what they loved, and once you have your surgery, you’ll keep playing together—“

Kiyoshi’s eyes were soft. “Riko.”

She stared him in the face, challenging in her certainty that he’d be okay, one day. That she hadn’t ended his basketball career forever.

He caught up to her in the kitchen, where she was trying to figure out how to get all the lumps out of the hot chocolate she was preparing; loomed over her like—like him, smelled like him, was so goddamn _warm_ like him, and she looked up at his face and knew.

“Where’s yours?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet, and she wanted to kiss him for that alone.

Instead, she feigned confusion. “I don’t really like hot chocolate, you know th—“

“Riko,” he said, all muscle, all shoulder, all immovable love. “Your schedule. You made ones for us. Where’s yours?”

“Me?” she said. “Oh, I’m pretty well set-up, grade-wise, I figured I’d just wing it.”

Kiyoshi smiled at her, but it was weird and almost—hostile, like she’d told a joke that he hated. “You’ve never winged anything in your life.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” She tried on a smile with almost nonexistent success and tapped her temple. “It’s just all up here.”

“Riko.”

Her hands were shaking. She crushed tiny lumps of powdered chocolate against the edge of the mug with a fork. “Okay, I made one, I just didn’t bring it. I’m here to help you guys—“

Kiyoshi reached out, his fingers touching hers briefly, and then he said, in a voice tight with terrible realization, “you’re not coming to Tokyo.”

Riko closed her eyes.

“Why?” he asked, still so calm, a calm she could set her barometer by to gauge the storm ahead. “You said yourself they have an excellent sports medicine program. We could take the same classes, you could continue to coach. Junpei—“   
Riko opened her eyes. “You can’t tell him,” she said, hearing how desperate she sounded and hating it, _hating_ it. “Teppei, please, you can’t.”

“There’s nothing to tell, because it doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why?”

She cleared her throat. “My father,” she started.

His face cleared in realization. “Did he find out you were dating—“

“No,” said Riko quickly, “god, no, I don’t think either of you would be alive if he did.” The corner of Kiyoshi’s mouth turned up, tiny and relieved, and she smiled back before sobering again, her fingers toying with the fork. “But,” she said, “he–he has other plans. For me.”

Kiyoshi’s eyebrows rose. “And you’re going along with them?”

Riko swallowed. “It’s—big, it’s. America. It would be good, I’d, I’d make a lot of money, I could support him when he gets old and—“

“And what?” Kiyoshi asked, in a tone more befitting their other boyfriend than him, sharp and tactless in his dismay. “And erases the lines between you and your mom completely? Riko—“

She took a breath. “Please,” she said, as steadily as she could. “Just—give me time. Don’t say anything. Not yet, not until after the Winter Cup.”

He stared at her, eyes a little wild. “That’s not how this works,” he said. “That decision’s not just yours.”

He turned and started to leave. Riko bit her lip, hard, trying to anchor herself. This couldn’t—it couldn’t fall apart _now_ , not yet, she wasn’t. Equipped. “Yes,” she said firmly. “It is.”

He turned to her, face caught between confusion and fight, and she held his eyes. “This is something that could jeopardize his play, an emotional factor that might affect us as a team,” she said, feeling like every word was sandpaper against her throat. “So yes, it is my call.”

For a moment she thought he might argue, and then his spine slumped, just a little. “I don’t want to lie to him,” he said, helpless.

All the steel went out of her, and she dropped her head. “So we just—don’t say anything,” she said tentatively. “I’m—it’s not decided, anyway. I might not get in.”

He looked at her, fragile, like a drop of water could break his surface tension and he’d be laughing, or crying, or both. “Come on,” he said, “don’t do that. Don’t—downplay yourself to make me feel better.”

“I’m not,” she objected, “I’m serious, all they said was that they liked the essay my dad submitted to them, I still have to do the rest of the application—they haven’t seen my grades—“

Kiyoshi shook his head, his mouth disappointed. “Your grades are perfect and we both know it.”

She tried to hold out, but gave up, nodding miserably. She expected him to leave her there, but he stepped forward instead, catching her up in a tight embrace, and she pressed her head to his chest until it ached with unshed tears. 

“Change your mind,” Kiyoshi said into her hair. “Please, before either of us has to say anything. Change your mind.”

She pulled back a little and he let her go, his face crumpling at her silence. She reached up and smoothed her thumbs over his cheeks. “Don’t,” she said. “Game face on, okay?”

He closed his eyes, relaxed his features, and for the thousandth time since they’d met put aside his pain to make space for hers. “Okay, Coach,” he said. “Okay.”

+

Riko blew the whistle for her first-years to change from warm ups to drills, and Izuki stepped up to her side. ”You know,” he said conversationally, “the triangle is actually the stablest geometric form.”

Riko looked sideways at him, silent, and he waited a few beats and then said, “what?”

She raised her eyebrows. “I was waiting for the pun.”

He grinned at her. “I’m branching out,” he said. “Izuki Shun’s Fun Fact and Good Advice Corner.”

Riko smiled despite herself. “And what makes you think I need either good advice or fun facts?”

He gave her a look, his eyes sharp. “Don’t insult me,” he said. “Eagle eye, remember? I can see the state of play, and you’re benching yourself for no reason.”

Riko licked her lips. “I’m not,” she objected, but it was weak.

Izuki crossed his arms. “You haven’t kissed Hyuuga in like a week and a half,” he said. “He thinks he did something wrong.”

Riko swallowed hard. She didn’t—she. “He tells you how much we _kiss_?”

“Friendship with that man is hell,” Izuki said flatly. “All Hyuuga, all the time. Does he ever ask about me? Does he ask if I _want_ to know about his trio bisexcapades?” He paused. “Trisexcapades?” He narrowed his eyes and then shrugged. “I guess I’ll just stick to ‘threesome’, can’t go wrong with a classic, even if it does miss out on the sexuality factor.”

Riko went red, shocked. “He told you we had a—“

Izuki smirked at her. “No,” he said, “but now I know. Good for you.” He held out a hand for a high five.

Riko buried her face in one hand and slapped his palm with the other.

Izuki caught her fingers in his, and when she lifted her head his face had cleared into something steady and earnest. “Seriously, Riko,” he said. “I told you this when you all first got together, but don’t minimize your importance. Don’t take yourself out of this thing.”

Her face still felt hot, but now it was a sick sort of hot, feverish. “I have to,” she said, and she heard her own voice go thick. “I—it’s so much worse if I don’t, Shun. I have to believe that they’re. Enough without me.”

He stared at her. “Why?”

She shook her head. He was her friend, but he was Hyuuga’s first—always had been, and always would be. “Sorry,” she said. “I—I really appreciate it. But. Sorry.”

Izuki raised a shoulder in a shrug. “Your business,” he said, but there was a coolness to his voice that she’d never heard, an edge, and she swallowed.

This—was going to be harder than anything she’d ever done.

+

The game against Touo was an incredibly welcome distraction, a challenge that took her over completely.

Sometimes Riko’s favorite thing about coaching was that she didn’t have to think about herself. Life—the future, the train tracks she had laid, the choices that were always looming, the people she was always, always terrified of letting down—it all faded, the only thing that mattered was the room in front of her. She could lose herself in the rush of play, in her team, her breath their breath, the impact of the ball against the floor her pulse. 

Even—guiltily, horribly—she could leave behind the walls she’d been setting up between herself and her boyfriends, because they _weren’t_ her boyfriends, here. Here they were hers again in truth, if not in the same way; here she was their general and they were her lieutenants, an entirely different sort of intimate interdependence, one she could still allow herself to feel. 

And—they won. Kuroko’s frustration pulled Kagami into the Zone like a meteor pulled to earth, blazing and bright, and she could barely keep her eyes on the ball as he and Aomine shifted and flickered over the court, the rest of her boys— _her_ boys, hers—keeping them locked together so Aomine never had an opening, never broke away, and then it was over. They’d won.

The aftermath was a blur—everyone was embracing her, everyone was laughing, and when she came out of it, watching the media interview her team—her team, _hers_ —she was so exhausted and relieved and pleased that she barely felt it when Momoi touched her on the elbow. It was only after she’d done it again, a little more prompting, that she startled and turned to see the other coach watching her.

Riko swallowed, but there was none of the bitterness she expected in Momoi’s face. Instead, she looked like Riko felt—dazed, disbelieving, and happy.

“Momoi-san?” she asked.

Momoi smiled at her. “I wanted to thank you.” 

Riko blinked. "Me? For what?” 

Momoi cocked her head. "What else? For winning.” She bit her lip. “Dai-chan needed it.”

Riko shrugged. “Kagami—“ 

Momoi smiled, a curled, knowing thing. "Sure," she said. "That's what the media will say—they might even mention Tetsu-kun, now that he's getting flashy, you should be careful about that—but you and I, we know better, don't we." 

Riko grinned despite herself. "I guess we do.”

Momoi's eyes crinkled up. "Behind every great basketball player…" 

"The power behind the Zone," Riko quipped, and then grimaced. "Sorry, god, I've been hanging out with Izuki too much.” 

Momoi raised an eyebrow at her, and the silence stretched a little too long. Riko swallowed. Early on in her friendship with Hyuuga, before she’d stopped thinking of him just as a nuisance with an excellent work ethic and started thinking of him as—as him, as _her_ nuisance with an excellent work ethic—he’d confessed that her ability to sum people up with a glance scared him. She’d laughed it off at the time, but when Momoi turned those startling eyes on her she kind of knew what he’d meant. 

"Anyway," Momoi said at last. "I just thought I'd express my gratitude, since Dai-chan won't be doing so himself.” 

Riko licked her lips. "Thanks," she said, and was surprised to find how sincerely she meant it. It felt nice, the respect in Momoi’s voice. 

She watched her turn to go. It was strange to see her without Aomine. They were such a pair, romantically entangled or no. Most people—sexist people—probably thought Momoi was the soft heart of the duo to Aomine's colder, ambitious head. But interact with them for any length of time and it became clear immediately that Momoi was absolutely the mind, guiding the explosive emotion that ran constantly through Aomine's thrumming veins. 

Riko was glad he’d found Kuroko and Kagami. There was too much heart in that chest for one person to possibly hold. 

A memory flashed across her mind—warm skin against her fingers, a different heartbeat against her palm. 

"Momoi-san," she called, and Momoi turned. Riko bit her lip. “U-um. What are you going to do after high school?” 

Momoi blinked at her. "I don't know," she said slowly. "Haven't really thought about it, it's still a ways off for me. I guess it depends on what Dai—“ She stopped. "Or," she said, “maybe—maybe it doesn't, anymore." She stared hard at the floor between her feet, her face pinched. 

Riko took a step toward her. “Momoi-san?” 

Momoi looked up at her, her eyes thoughtful, the quirk of her mouth a little sad. "You ever feel like you spend most of your time doing things for other people?” 

Riko laughed. “I—yes. Hell yes.” 

The corner of Momoi's mouth turned up, and she shook her head. “Why?" 

Riko thought about that. "I guess it comes with being a coach, right? Your team's success becomes your success. Their happiness kind of—becomes yours, because you helped make it happen. On _and_ off the court.” 

Momoi stared at her, and then grinned wide. "I meant why do you ask." 

Riko flushed. "Oh," she said. 

Momoi wrinkled her nose. “I think you’re right, though. Doesn’t seem exactly fair, does it?” 

Riko tucked her hair behind her ear. “No,” she said, “it doesn’t.” 

“Whatever your reason for asking,” Momoi said softly, “keep that in mind, that unfairness, and try to do something for you, for once.” She took a breath. “I will, too.” 

Some spirit of mischief seized Riko—she was pretty willing to blame Izuki again—and she stuck out a hand, pinky extended. “Promise?” 

Laughter bubbled up Momoi’s whole body, her shoulders shaking with it before it slipped out her mouth. She mirrored the gesture, linking their fingers and tugging. “Promise.” 

Riko started to pull away, but Momoi crooked her finger tighter, holding her eyes. Her gaze sharpened. “Next time,” she said, “I’ll win. That’s a promise, too.”

It was—more than that; it was a reminder, a sign pointing to the year between now and then, between the moment of Riko’s anxiety and its focus. There was something in Momoi’s eyes that said _slow down._ That said, _be here._

Riko smirked at her, feeling light and determined. “We’ll see,” she said.

Momoi held her eyes for another minute, and then let her go. “Rest up,” she said, “you’ve got a Winter Cup to win.”

+ 

They did win. They won, and Kiyoshi stepped onto a plane. Hyuuga was there to see him off, but Riko—coward, _coward_ —wished him goodbye the night before, kissing him hard to try and seal his lips against a secret she had no right to ask him to keep.

Hyuuga drew her closer—not to fill the space Kiyoshi left behind, but because they were the only ones that understood that space, and she tried—she tried to be there and not there, there for him, in her sympathy and her shared longing, but not there for—herself.

She couldn’t figure out how to say it. That was all it was. She couldn’t figure out how to—deliver the news without it coming out disaster, and it wasn’t disaster. It was logical. It made sense. It was the only choice.

She finally told him over dinner, weeks after Kiyoshi left. Kiyoshi was there—skypeing in from the hospital in America—and it was his eyes she held when she told Hyuuga calmly, “I’m not coming to Tokyo after we graduate.”

There was a long silence. The kind of silence that crept in under her skin, shook her up from the inside out, and she couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t look at either of them, forced her eyes to the wall.

“Why?” was the first thing he said, and she had. Prepared for this, come up with lists and lists of reasons, but they were all—nothing, in her mouth, before she could even form a syllable, just empty air.

“I—“ she said. “My father, he submitted my scores to this medical program in America—it’s huge, it’s so prestigious and it’s early acceptance and for a girl, it’s even more—“

“Medical,” Hyuuga said, like he’d never heard the word before. “Like, sports medicine, or—“

Riko shook her head. “Regular. Surgical, eventually.”

Hyuuga blinked. “But—that’s not even what you want.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Riko snapped. Why couldn’t he just _understand,_ Teppei understood! She glanced sideways at her other boyfriend, whose closed expression hit her like a slap in the face.

She was alone. She had to face this conversation alone.

That—that was fine. She’d always known she would. It was just. Early.

“Listen,” she said heavily. “You two, you’re so much—you’re so much _more_. You always have been, a pair, our aces, our game-winners. _Partners_ , I can’t—“ she took a breath, tried to force herself to take just one and not great gasping tides of it. “I’m not a part of that.”

Hyuuga shook his head. “No,” he said. “I won’t let you do this, I won’t let you break up with us because of some stupid medical program—“

“I’m not,” Riko said, and they both blinked at her. “Not yet,” she clarified, “not until graduation, and then—“

“Not yet,” Hyuuga breathed, disbelieving. His eyes were blazing behind his glasses. “What, do you have us pencilled in on your calendar, June 8th: graduate high school, June 9th: break up with my boyfriends—“

“ _No_ ,” Riko insisted, because she didn’t. It was too risky to commit anything to writing where they might have found it. She’d just—thought about it a lot, the week or two or three she would leave so they could all enjoy summer for a while but not too long, because the rest of it should be spent saying goodbye. The way she would say it, all the justifications that had seemed so solid in the darkness of her bedroom but melted through her fingers now.

“Riko.” Teppei, now, actively taking Junpei’s side against her, and the tactical side of her said _good_ in a little vicious voice, the tactical side of her said _this just proves my point._ “You can’t seriously expect us to just say, ‘okay, sure, break up with us in a year, no problem’!”

Hyuuga, piggybacking off his point ( _excellent follow-through_ , and her eyes were stinging, stinging): “The whole point was that we do this together.”

Teppei, pleading: “Just—stop acting like it’s decided, like this is your only choice.”

Hyuuga, his fists curled on the tabletop, changing tacts: “I can’t believe you’re planning on breaking up with us because of your stupid controlling _creep_ of a father—“

“It was never going to be forever!”

She didn’t mean to say it. Not now, hell, not _ever_ , didn’t ever want to see the looks on their faces, but once it was out she couldn’t take it back, and it wouldn’t stop, her fear and her helplessness making her cruel. “God, you think what we have is normal? Is sustainable? You think we can just—go on like this indefinitely, and what? Get married, all three of us, settle down, have kids? This—it’s—“ She clenched her teeth against her words until her jaw ached, until she could wrestle them, blunt them with her tongue and release them again, no less true but less barbed, breathed slower: “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. This, this is the _best_ thing that ever happened to me. But it was _never_ going to be forever.”

Hyuuga said nothing. She couldn’t look at his face, and after a moment he stood up, gathering his laptop and thus Teppei with him, and stalked off, slamming the door behind him.

She snatched his mug off the table, hurling it with all her might. It smashed against the wall with a spectacular crash; she wanted it to be satisfying, but instead it just cut her strings. She slumped forward, her head hitting the table.

She stayed like that for a long time, but the silence made her itch, so she stood up. Some people, she knew, reacted to grief with inaction, hiding away from the world. Those people hadn’t seen her father slide into nothingness, hadn’t seen him carved out by the force of his grief as he allowed it to wash over him, hadn’t seen him transform from the muscular, active man of her childhood to a shadow who slept the days away, who gave up meals and left empty sake bottles in every corner like sacrifices to the gods, petitions to bring her mother back. 

Riko would not let herself follow in his footsteps, so she grieved straightforward, headed off her sorrow and seized it by the throat before it could do the same to her. She took a long breath and forced herself to relive the calm in Kiyoshi’s voice, the terrible blank of his eyes. Forced herself to think about Hyuuga’s face—though she hadn’t been able to bring herself to look at it, she knew what it would look like, knew the hurt in the corners of his mouth, the betrayal in his eyes. It had haunted her for weeks _in potentia_ , after all. She forced herself to hold both of them in her mind and say, _not mine. Not anymore._

 _Not mine_ , she repeated to herself, crossing into her bedroom and taking the half-completed application out of her desk drawer where it was tucked under old class schedules. Not mine.

She sat on her bed to fill it out, her papers propped up against her knees. Her pen wobbled across the page, and the neat lines of numbers and characters blurred. _Not mine._

She brushed her fist across her face, her cheeks hot, her head aching. “I always knew,” she reminded herself. “It was never going to be forever.”

Her phone lit up next to her and she carefully set down her pen to look at it. It was a text message from Hyuuga, and at the sight of his contact picture—smiling and perfect, from their first trio date on the beach, what felt now like years past—everything in her balked. Everything in her said, _wait until later,_ everything in her said, _keep strong._ Everything in her said, _look at it tomorrow, when you can believe yourself a little better._

She opened it anyway, a traitor tear slipping down her cheek.

It said, _I won’t do this without you._

She didn’t know if he meant _this_ as in dating Teppei or _this_ as in Tokyo. She was willing to bet he meant both, but the first was too enormous; the first she couldn’t believe, so when she replied she only addressed the second: _I know. That’s why I made you a plan._

She shouldn’t have responded. She shouldn’t have read it at all. She, she shouldn’t, she—he was calling her, and she was picking up, putting the phone silent to her ear.

“I didn’t say _can’t_ , Riko,” he said, his voice low and furious. “I said _won’t_ , as in I refuse, as in I _will not_ , as in this wasn’t the _deal_ , as in don’t do this to me, please—I, please.”

She pressed a hand over her eyes and tried to breathe.

“I don’t—I don’t understand,” he said, and his voice was worse than she could ever have imagined. “I don’t understand how you can just throw us away—“

Riko curled into herself. She put the phone on speaker and laid it out in front of her so she had something to look at, something that wasn’t all the different ways her boyfriend would be standing right now, would be hurting, all the things he would be doing with his perfect angles-and-corners body, all the new gestures of pain she’d taught him.

She stared at it, silent, a bright thing in the gathering darkness of her room. Her connection to the brightest thing she’d ever had.

“Did I not make it clear to you?” he demanded, crackling and harsh. “Did I not say when this all began that I couldn’t choose, that I spent over a year saying nothing about how much I loved you because I didn’t want either of you unless I could have you both?”

Riko lay down, curled herself around her phone.

“Riko,” Hyuuga said, “I know you’re there, I can hear you moving, why—why won’t you say anything?”

Riko clenched her jaw. _Because I know if I open my mouth I’ll ask you to come back._

“I’m coming back,” Hyuuga said abruptly, like he could read her mind, and he—he could, he’d always been able to, he could read her better than anyone, her father included. “We’re going to sit down and we’re going to talk about this—“

Riko sat up, scooped up her phone, and put it to her ear. “No,” she said, keeping it calm with an exertion of iron will. “There’s nothing more to talk about.”

“Bullshit,” Hyuuga snapped. “Riko—“

“Hyuuga-kun,” Riko said, and _heard_ it pull him up short. “Go home. Get some rest. I—“ Her voice broke, and she swallowed rapidly. “I’m ordering you. As y-your coach.”

Hyuuga was silent for a long moment, and then he said stiffly, “As you say,” and hung up on her.

+

It was too late to be here—too early, really; her watch read 5:36 AM but the grit in the corners of her eyes insisted was late, instead, despite the fitful hours of sleep she’d managed. The tide was all the way out—drawn away from her across flat, hard-packed sand, murmuring to itself and turning over and over and over in the dark.

“You know,” said Teppei in her ear, “I do understand.”

Riko sagged. “I knew you did,” she said tiredly. “I knew you _would_ , it’s Junpei that’s—“

Teppei cut her off. “You’re wrong,” he said, for maybe the only time ever, and it pulled her up short. “I don’t think you’re doing the right thing. I think you’re doing the worst thing you could be doing, _because_ I understand.” 

Riko stared at the sea. “What—what do you mean?”

“I understand,” said Kiyoshi in her ear, “being pressured to do something—be something—you hate by someone you care about.”

Riko swallowed. “Teppei.”

“You know this,” he said. “I know you know it.”

“It’s different,” she insisted. “Hanamiya wanted you to be something—objectively terrible, something morally wrong, wanted you to cheat and hurt people, I’d be—doing good. I’d be helping people. I can’t give that up for my own selfishness.”

He didn’t say anything, and she bit her lip. “Besides, I don’t—I wouldn’t hate it. Being a surgeon.”

“Yes, you would,” Kiyoshi said. “There aren’t nearly enough people to yell at. Besides, I’m not—really talking about the surgery part. I’m talking about giving in to what he wants you to be, the role he wants you to play.”

His voice was shaky and sad, and Riko stared at her knees, the wind picking at her skirt.

“Aren’t you going to tell me to just think about this as half-time?” he asked, awful and resigned, and Riko tilted her head back to stare at the fading stars, treating her tears like a nosebleed, like if she just kept looking upward they’d dry up on their own.

+

“I’m sure Kagami would have watched my back again if you’d needed him to,” Kuroko said as they waited, pressed against the hallway wall, for the last of the faculty to leave the lounge. 

“I know,” Riko said, “but I feel a little bad leaving you guys to do all my dirty work.” She smirked. “He and Aomine can have some alone time.”

Kuroko laughed, softly, and Riko raised an eyebrow at him. “What?” she asked.

“Nothing, I just.” He cocked his head, his smile lingering. “I used you as an excuse to leave them alone together, once. I wonder if they’ll think I’m doing it again.”

The school was dark, and Kuroko truly was like a shadow at her side. She led the way to the faculty office and positioned herself outside, scanning the halls as they made sure everyone had left for the day. She didn’t even notice Kuroko leave her side or return empty-handed, the schedule back in its rightful place, and she jumped when she touched her back, barely suppressing a yelp.

“God,” she said. “You really should get that catsuit.”

Kuroko sent her a little sideways smile and walked her home. It was late, but the wind was warm, and she stared up at the trees along her street, their branches tipped with little buds that, even in the darkness, showed a little bit green.

On her doorstep she paused. “Kuroko-kun,” she said, “do you ever think about the future?”

Kuroko cocked his head at her. “Of course,” he said, “doesn’t everyone?”

Riko licked her lips. “What do you want to do? After high school.”

Kuroko smiled. “Keep playing basketball,” he said. “My basketball. With Kagami-kun, and with Aomine-kun.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little—I don’t know,” Riko said. She frowned at the ground between her feet. “It doesn’t seem right to structure your life around your boyfriends that way.” She winced. “Sorry.”

Kuroko made a small noise of negation. “It’s okay, Riko-san,” he said, “but you’re wrong.”

She blinked at him, and he ran a hand through his hair. There was something—looser about him, lately, happier—ever since they’d won the Winter Cup he’d been wearing his heart much more on his sleeve. She’d seen him smile more than ever, even seen him laugh.

“It’s not about centering my life around them,” he said, “it’s about knowing that as I do the things I want to do in my life, they’ll be there, doing the things _they_ want to do with _their_ lives. I don’t really believe in fate—not the way Midorima-kun does, with signs and stars and charts. But I know that this—us, the three of us—if it hadn’t happened now, it would have happened later. We would have come together anyway.” He shrugged, like he wasn’t assuming the entire weight of the future on his slim shoulders, like that disarming, unthinkable certainty was no big deal. “We fill each other up like no one else could.”

Riko stared at him, and he wrinkled his nose. “Sorry,” he said, “I made a speech.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s—okay.”

He smiled at her again, and she let him go, watching him disappear into the darkness, and then snuck back into her bedroom. She retrieved the application from her desk. She was finished—tomorrow she’d leave it on her father’s desk, to be covered in stamps and sent to America with the morning mail.

She stared at it for a long time.

After a while she sent Kuroko a text, for lack of anything better to do with her hands. _were they suspicious? :p_

 _they didn’t even notice,_ he sent her back. _i think they were playing some sort of gay chicken when i came home_

Riko smiled to herself, lying back in her bed. She thought about them, about Kuroko and Kagami and Aomine, so totally caught up in one another, bound together by skill and fate and pure, insane chemistry. Destined to be—whatever they were to each other, forever.

Shadows moved on the ceiling of her bedroom, and Riko spread her hands like stars, stretching her arms up as far as she could and keeping them there until they started to ache with the downward pull of the world.  

_Do you know how proud we’d all be?_ he’d said when he put the application on her desk. 

_A real doctor—my girl, supporting me in my old age,_ he’d said, watching her with his too-warm gaze as she slit open the envelope.

_This is what I dreamed for you for so long._

She left it torn into neat pieces, stacked underneath his coffee cup where he’d be sure to find it first thing.

+

She stepped up next to Hyuuga at the airport. It took him a minute to turn and look at her, and she didn’t look back— _couldn’t_ look back, yet, just rooted around in her bag for a minute before handing him a color-coded binder.

Hyuuga flipped it open. “This is—?”

Riko bit her lip. “My schedule,” she said, glancing sideways, and his eyes caught hers, filled with dawning hope. “For Tokyo.”

She’d stayed up half the night working on it but she felt more awake and alive than she had in weeks. Hyuuga stared at her, and then down at the folder in his hands. He flipped through it distractedly, then looked at her again. “So—“

“So,” she confirmed, her smile a little shaky. “For.” She would love to say forever. Ached to say forever. But forever was a word in another language—one she _almost_ knew, knew the translation of, but the syllables wouldn’t form, couldn’t form with full knowledge, and she refused to ever operate with anything less. “For as long as you’ll have me.”

Hyuuga reached for her—stopped himself—reached for her again, but differently, the hand he’d aimed at her jaw curling around the back of her neck instead, and he pulled her against him, wrapping his long arms around her, and she wrapped him up in return.

He pulled back to fumble for her hand, still not really looking at her face, and she saw a tremble to his jaw that dropped her heart into her toes. She was about to say something—apologize, try—try to apologize, try to tell him how much she meant it, how much he meant, when his face brightened, and he raised his hand in greeting.

She turned to see Kiyoshi moving through the crowds. He looked tan, and tall, and tired, and hers.

His face brightened when he saw them, and they watched him approach. He stopped a few steps away, looking back and forth between them. “Guys,” he said, almost laughing, and then he saw their joined hands, and something shifted.

“I told you,” Hyuuga said quietly, “we’d be waiting.”

Kiyoshi leaned in and kissed him, quick, and then looked at Riko, his eyes wild with hope. “You—“

Riko nodded. “Tore it up,” she said, and halfway saying it she realized she actually _had_ , that her father would have found it by now, that she’d triggered an avalanche across her train tracks. Her mouth went dry. Kiyoshi raised a hand to her face, pushed her hair out of her eyes, his hand a steady and warm shield against her panic. “Brave,” he said, his eyes warm. Riko kissed the heel of his palm, clung to Junpei’s fingers. “Welcome home.” “Thank you,” Kiyoshi said, and his voice was a tiny bit ragged, the sonic counterpoint to Hyuuga’s trembling jaw. “Riko—thank you.” Riko closed her eyes, felt them both draw closer to her. Pushing in at her edges, holding her together. _We fill each other up like no one else could._

“It’s a start,” she said, and her voice came out calm, came out almost laughing. “Maybe in a few years I’ll even be able to tell him about one of you.” 

+

Two years later she was sprawled on the couch in her small Tokyo apartment. She was half sulking—she’d been banished from the kitchen—half just listening to Hyuuga and Kiyoshi bicker as they cooked, when she got a text message. It was from Momoi—the first in almost six months. She raised her eyebrows and opened it.

It was a picture—a selfie; Momoi was smiling, her eyes bright, her hair just as vibrant but cut short to just beneath her chin. She was holding a thick manila envelope, the contents tugged out just enough that Riko could read the beginnings of the word _Congratulations._

 _thank you,_ Momoi said in a separate text, _for the recommendation._

“Riko,” Hyuuga called, “did you seriously buy baking powder—“

“That’s what the recipe said!” she called back, without looking up from her phone.

“Baking soda, babe,” Kiyoshi called back. “It’s—a different thing.”

“Whatever,” Riko muttered to herself. _you’re welcome,_ she responded to Momoi. _enjoy._ She left her phone on the table, and it was hours until she saw Momoi's _yeah, you too._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aahhhh hello. hi. hello.
> 
> I'm having a hard time conceptualizing that I'm actually posting this, to be honest; I spent so long staring at it I was pretty sure it would never be done. The series in general, but this fic in particular, as well—I wrote the scene between Riko and Momoi way back in. Probably June? And here we are. At The End.
> 
> I truly, honestly cannot overstate how much I want to thank you all for your response to these fics. This has been a monumentally complicated undertaking for me, and one I felt repeatedly I was not qualified to handle, and it's also been a monumentally self-indulgent process—I thought everyone would be weirded out by the interlocking narratives thing, and instead I have received some of the most amazing constructive and enthusiastic feedback I've ever gotten on anything. Seriously, it's been overwhelmingly lovely. I love you all, and thank you for reading.
> 
> So!! Notes. There are crossover scenes here with [Rise Like the Bright Morning Stars](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3790234/chapters/8436163); Aomine sees the trio in the mall in the scene at the beginning of this chapter, and his conversation with Riko happens as well. (There's also a weird scene with Tatsuya? He hasn't been in this much, huh. That scene's weird, like it should link to something, but doesn't? Hmmm)
> 
> Speaking of that scene! All credit to my bro indevan (vertigoats on tumblr) for the headcanon of Alex's fiancee Rachel, who I love, go talk to them about her!!
> 
> Anyway. I have so many more thoughts about this 'verse and these kids than could ever fit in this notes box, so please—if you want to hear them, or yell at me, or say hi, or whatever else—come see me on tumblr at flightlesscrowkids, and on twitter as @crowkids.
> 
> And. Seriously. Thank you.

**Author's Note:**

> This literally took months to get anywhere I was even SLIGHTLY happy with it; that's what happens when you put too much pressure on yourself to make something really really good. As always, let me know what you think, either here or at flightlesscrowkids dot tumblr dot com. And—seriously, thank you, thank you, thank you. The response to this series has blown me away.
> 
> This part brings us up through the entirety of [Your Fonder Heart](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3183935)! WHAT COULD BE NEXT
> 
> Also - as a note, this series in general acts as if the Uncrowned Kings actually played all together as a team in middle school, because it. Doesn't make any sense that they didn't. Cool? Cool.


End file.
